When is “Treatment” actually treatment under the FMLA?
Imagine that your employee who has been diagnosed with anxiety and chronic back pain asked for FMLA leave for an afternoon doctor appointment. Your employee had already provided a doctor’s certification that his condition required periodic treatments but the afternoon appointment was with a different doctor. So, you grant the FMLA leave for the appointment. But later when you find out that he took the entire day off you started looking into what he did that day. It turns out that in the morning he went to the first doctor’s office to make sure his records were being sent to the other doctor’s office where his afternoon appointment was scheduled. In the morning he saw the first doctor in the lobby and got a refill on two of his prescriptions but he was neither examined nor evaluated while he was there. (more…)
