In July 2019 the complainant, a teacher, filed an application for early retirement, on the grounds of her medical condition. In her complaint to the Office of the Ombudsman, she claimed that due to a delay in the handling of her application she had been left with no income for about two years - from the time of her filing the application to the time of her receiving a final decision on the matter.
It transpired that a delay had occurred in forwarding the complainant's application to the Ministry of Health medical committee and that the complainant's subsequent summons to the committee had been faulty. As a result, only in June 2020 had the medical committee reached a decision on her matter, according to which there were insufficient medical grounds for the termination of her employment with the Civil Service. The committee had convened in the complainant's absence, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the complainant had appealed the decision.
There had also occurred an unreasonable delay in appointing a time for convening the appeals committee, and only in August 2021 - about a year after the complainant filed the appeal - did the appeals committee reach a decision. The committee concluded that the complainant had a permanent disability and that she was unable to continue working. Notwithstanding, the Ministry of Education determined that the date of the complainant's retirement was September 2021, some two years after she had filed her application.
From the time of filing her application till the time of the decision of the appeals committee, the complainant had been on unpaid leave.
Due to the mishandling of the complainant's application, the Office of the Ombudsman contacted the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, and requested that the appeals committee reexamine the complainant's matter and consider the time of inception of the complainant's disability and the possibility of determining an earlier date.
Following the intervention of the Office of the Ombudsman, the complainant's matter was reexamined, and in a joint discussion between the Civil Service Commission and the Ministry of Education it was decided to pay her a retirement-adaptation grant equivalent to her disability benefit, for the months in which she had not received a salary.