Her son's seizures, her own surgery, her mother on a ventilator - then the firing
A former Virtua Health employee has sued the health system, alleging it fired her after she sought leave to care for her family.
The worker, a former product inventory coordinator based in Camden, New Jersey, filed the complaint in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey on July 29, 2026. She brings claims under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the New Jersey Family Leave Act (NJFLA) and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (NJLAD), a state anti-bias law.
According to the complaint, the worker had been with Virtua since 2018 and, the filing says, worked seven years without incident. It alleges her circumstances changed over a two-month period in 2025.
The filing says she applied for intermittent FMLA leave on August 27, 2025 to care for her son, who had begun experiencing seizures. In October 2025, the complaint alleges, she developed serious medical conditions of her own. She was admitted to a Virtua-owned hospital on October 8, 2025, ran a fever the filing puts at 107 degrees, and underwent surgery on October 11, 2025. After the surgery, according to the complaint, she contracted MRSA - a drug-resistant infection - and became septic.
The complaint alleges that when she returned to work on October 15, 2025 and told her supervisor she needed help lifting heavy objects, the supervisor agreed the accommodation was necessary but took no further steps to arrange it. As a result, the filing says, she continued to lift heavy boxes on her own, against her doctor's recommendation.
The complaint says her mother was admitted to the same Virtua hospital on November 1, 2025 and was later placed on a ventilator. During a November 7, 2025 visit, the filing alleges, a nurse became combative while the worker was helping her mother, and threatened to call security. The following day, according to the complaint, the worker was told she was banned from the hospital over that encounter and was escorted out. She was then suspended pending an investigation, the filing says.
The worker alleges she never received the results of that investigation. Instead, the complaint states, after she applied for unemployment benefits, Virtua notified the state that it had terminated her employment because, in the words the filing attributes to the company, she had "leveraged [her] badge, scrubs and secured access as a Virtua employee to gain access to a patient care area; while off the clock for personal reasons."
The worker alleges that explanation is "pretext" and that she was in fact fired for needing leave and accommodations to care for her son, her mother and herself. She claims Virtua did not notify her of her leave rights and did not apply its policies uniformly.
For HR professionals, the filing points to familiar risk areas: following through on the interactive process once an accommodation is requested, documenting the basis for any discipline, and weighing the timing of a termination that falls close to protected leave. And a reason an employer gives to a state agency can resurface in litigation, so the underlying paperwork needs to hold up.
The allegations have not been tested in court, and no judge has ruled on the claims.
