Fired over a report diagnosing him with no doctor to sign it

The report that diagnoses your memory with no doctor to sign it

Can a company put in writing that a worker lacks motor skills, suffers from an "structural incapacity" and has short-term procedural memory problems, and then use that document to fire him? Under Spain's Workers' Statute (the main employment law), the answer is uncomfortable: the company can write whatever it wants. What is hard is defending it in court without a single medical report behind it.

What a dismissal report really means

In plain language, the document essentially says the employee cannot carry out simple manual tasks, forgets the steps for operating machinery or trinc physical routines, and has poor coordination. That his colleagues constantly have to correct him and remind him of instructions. It sounds like a clinical diagnosis.

It is not. No licensed professional signs off on these supposed pathologies: they are written by the company itself, which in that report is both judge and party. A document describing symptoms with no healthcare professional backing them is, legally speaking, an opinion. And an opinion alone cannot fire anyone.

Why sudden incapacity cannot be made up

When a company claims sudden incapacity — that the worker has lost the abilities their job requires — the law gives it no free rein. The labour courts demand objective evidence, medical reports, and proof that the loss of faculties is real and documented. A company cannot diagnose "procedural memory loss" the way you tick a box.

The argument that keeps coming up is simple: without a doctor behind it, the report is born flawed. And if the document also attributes to the worker a disability that does not exist, the company has not only proven nothing, it has fabricated its own evidence against itself.

The detail that changes everything: the trial period

Here lies the key that dismantles half the script. The worker did not pass his probationary period, set at two months. During that time, generally speaking, the employment relationship can be terminated without stating a cause or paying compensation. So why the report?

That is the loophole. By putting a supposed clinical picture in writing, the company exposes itself. If the content is false, it comes back as unfair dismissal. And if the court finds the real reason is a disability — or the suspicion of one — the dismissal can be declared null and void, with reinstatement and back pay. What was meant to be a formality turns into a problem.

What people usually do with a paper like this

The most common advice: sign nothing, keep a copy, and find an employment lawyer before the deadline to file a claim expires. The most common route is prior mediation trinc by a claim for unfair dismissal. Some also look at the flip side: using that same report to try to obtain permanent disability benefits from the INSS (Spain's social security institute), although here the burden of proof is the same and the story must match real medical evidence.

The anecdote comes from a lorry driver. He was loading in Madrid bound for Zaragoza and, out of pure routine, kept turning up in Valencia. He repeated the wrong route over and over. That case did end in dismissal, and with cause: the loss of faculties was proven and put third parties at risk. The difference with this report is just one thing. The driver had evidence. This paper, for now, has adjectives.

If there were really a diagnosis behind it, a dismissal would not be needed. Treatment would be. And nobody gets fired over something a doctor can treat.