Summary Dismissal for Untruthful Notification when Reporting Sick

An employee who had untruthfully reported sick was rightly summarily dismissed by her employer.
An employee worked as an educator at a childcare institution in Hengelo.
On January 6, 2014, the employee reported sick via a WhatsApp message, in which she stated that she had gone to hospital that night for an appendectomy. When the employer contacted the hospital to ask for the employee’s room number, so as to send her some flowers, it turned out that the employee had not been admitted to the hospital at all.
The employer subsequently tried to contact the employee, but she did not answer her phone, nor did she respond to messages or open the door of her home. By letter of January 10, 2014, the employer announced he would discontinue her wage payment as of January 6, 2014. When, subsequently, it turned out that the employee had been spotted in Germany on January 8, 2014 and when her relatives informed him/her that she actually stayed on the isle of Texel, the employer summarily dismissed the employee by letter of January 16, 2014.
The employee invoked the nullity of the summary dismissal and claimed, in summary proceedings, admission to work and continued payment of her salary. She submitted a letter from her GP showing that the employee had reported to her GP in January 2014 with burnout complaints and that the GP's primary care assistant practitioner had had conversations with her regarding her psychological problems. This burnout allegedly justified the fact that she had been unreachable for a couple of days.
The Sub-district Court noted that the incorrectness of the message about the appendectomy might count heavily against the employee. She had, thus, seriously damaged the employer's trust. Given the incorrectness of her statement, the employer did not need to have the employee's illness checked by the occupational physician, as the employee had stated.
The Sub-district Court found no reason In the GP's summary statement to conclude that the employee's psychological condition on and after January 6, 2014 was so serious that her actions could not be held against her. The Sub-district Court did not consider it likely that the summary dismissal would not sustain in proceedings on the merits and, therefore, rejected the continued wage payment, claimed as an interim measure.

Disputes on the question of whether an employee is ill or not do not in principle result in the subsequent loss of the employment contract, but need to be settled in the context of the question of whether the employee is entitled to wages during illness or not.
In exceptional cases, however, a summary dismissal is still possible.
In such cases there must be more to it than a dispute about whether the employee is ill or not.
In the above case it was quite clear that the employee had seriously damaged the employer's trust by untruthfully reporting illness.
For the Sub-district Court it was sufficient to justify a summary dismissal.