A manager allegedly said the heavy assignment was meant to 'test' her injured shoulder
A hospital denied a long-serving technician's injury accommodation, returned her to heavy lifting, then fired her days after she objected, a lawsuit alleges.
NYU Hospitals Center is being sued by a former sterile processing technician who says the hospital refused her doctor-certified lifting limit, sent her back to physically demanding work, and fired her after nearly 25 years on the job.
The complaint, filed September 9, 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, brings disability discrimination, failure-to-accommodate and retaliation claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act and New York's state and city human rights laws.
According to the filing, the technician spent almost a quarter-century sterilizing surgical instruments, with steady performance reviews and no disciplinary record. Her job also meant loading and unloading sterilization machines on a rotation.
Her troubles began with a rotator cuff injury in 2023, the complaint says, followed by a neck and shoulder injury in March 2024 that she says happened when a tray became stuck. Her doctor certified that she could keep working within limits - most recently a cap of 25 pounds on pulling and lifting.
That restriction is where the dispute centers. While she was on leave, the hospital denied at least two requests to return with accommodations, the filing says, and later told her she could not come back with any restriction in place, citing what the complaint describes as "undue hardship." To return at all, she says she was required to produce a doctor's note that asked for no accommodation.
She came back in December 2025 with no restriction on file, according to the complaint, and was assigned heavy pushing and pulling of equipment weighing between 10 and 35 pounds - above the 25-pound limit her doctor had set only weeks earlier.
Then came the claim at the heart of the case. The complaint says her supervisor told her a director had ordered that assignment specifically to "test" her physical impairment.
Her pain worsened over the next few days, the filing says. When she told her supervisor she planned to take the matter to Human Resources, she alleges the response was swift: five days later, and six days after returning from leave, she was fired.
At the termination meeting, according to the complaint, managers accused her of making an obscene gesture and of yelling at a coworker. She denied both, telling them the episode actually involved a male coworker in a different department. The hospital also pointed to unrelated incidents from three to seven years earlier, the filing says, none of which had drawn discipline at the time. She calls the stated reasons false and pretextual - a legal term meaning the real reason was something else.
For HR leaders, the fact pattern reads like a checklist of accommodation-process risks. It raises whether an employer can make dropping medical restrictions a condition of returning to work, how solid an "undue hardship" call needs to be, and how a firing looks when it lands days after a worker raises a problem and mentions HR. The complaint leans hard on that timing.
The allegations have not been tested, and no court has ruled.
