Employment Commentary - 18/1/10
The Appeal Tribunal has handed down a judgement where it has examined the meaning of "long term" when assessing whether an illness has a substantial long term effect. The significance of this is that illnesses that do have a long term effect will be classed or are likely to be classed as disabilities for the purposes of the Disability Discrimination Act.
The question itself amounted to whether or not when considering what is long term, the Court could join the effects of two illnesses where the two were linked and one had naturally followed on from the other. In this case it was a bad back,turning into what a layman might consider to be Sciatica. The original Tribunal felt that you could not aggregate the effect of the two conditions, but the Appeal Tribunal felt differently and gave an indication that if the secondary illness is a consequence of the first, then it is likely that the Tribunal could add the effects of the two together.
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