The submission of medical certificates by employees to support their requests for sick leave is a common employment phenomenon. Employers often grapple with how to handle medical certificates they suspect are irregularly issued by a practitioner, particularly when the practitioner is notorious for 'selling' such certificates. 

In the recent case of Woolworths (Pty) Ltd v Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration and Others (JA90/22) [2024] ZALAC 29, the Labour Appeal Court had to consider how to deal with a situation where an employee was suspected of submitting an irregular medical certificate. After some investigation into the authenticity of the medical certificate, the employer satisfied itself on its suspicion that the medical practitioner appeared to be in the business of selling medical certificates. The employee was then charged with the misconduct of being in breach of company policies and procedures by submitting an irregular medical certificate to justify her absence. 

At no point, however, was the employee accused of buying or falsifying a medical certificate. Neither was she accused of not having been sick, nor of lying to the medical practitioner causing him to book her off under false pretenses. There was therefore no proof of wrongdoing on the employee’s part as she may have been genuinely sick.

The Labour Appeal Court thus upheld the CCMA’s finding and found that a suspicion that a medical practitioner is selling medical certificates to some patients does not mean that he cannot also legitimately examine and book others off from work. It also does not mean that a patient necessarily knew of the medical practitioner’s untoward actions in other instances. 

For employers, this means that an enquiry into the veracity of a medical certificate, as in the above instance, would be a question of the medical practitioner’s honesty and integrity instead of that of the employee. Any suspicion of impropriety of the medical practitioner must be reported to the relevant regulatory board. An employee may only be disciplined for misconduct resulting from their own actions, and not that of a medical practitioner, and the employer would need to show proof that the employee had improperly obtained a medical certificate to falsely claim for sick leave.


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