A 62-year-old woman, who works as an accountant and with a medical condition marked by the consequences of gastric cancer, has not been able to get the Justice to recognize her permanent disability after the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia ended up saying that her ailments do not prevent her from carrying out her daily work. The Chamber explains that, although her pathologies impose certain bodily restrictions on her, these do not conflict with the tasks of an administrative job, and that a limitation of such intensity as to separate her from her profession has not been proven.
According to the ruling of the TSJ 1692/2026 (available at this link from the Judicial Branch), the worker went to Social Security, but the entity resolved in March 2024 that she was not in any type of permanent disability situation. After exhausting the administrative route and seeing her previous claim rejected, the worker decided to go to court. In the first instance, the Social Court number 25 of Barcelona also dismissed his claim, absolving Social Security. Given this, the affected woman decided to appeal to insist that her state of physical health made her incapable of working in any profession or, at least, in hers.
Apparently, the woman suffers from the consequences of a “gastric adenocarcinoma… that has not recurred” (that is, a stomach tumor that has already been operated on and has not relapsed). After the treatments, he was left with a syndrome of dumping precocious, postprandial fullness, persistent asthenia and distal sensory neurotoxicity in the lower extremities. The medical opinions stated that the woman currently suffers from these injuries “with limitation to intense or continued physical effort.”
The woman alleged that her medical condition required her to eat a divided diet of six to seven small meals a day and that, in addition, she suffered from fecal incontinence, requiring the use of diapers. Even so, the court refused to modify the text, remembering that the first instance judge had already evaluated all the medical reports with a “more objective, disinterested and impartial” view than the expert opinion provided by the worker. Furthermore, the Court added that, even accepting the reports on incontinence (which estimated the frequency at four bowel movements a day), this “is not a relevant element to justify any of the degrees of incapacity that he claims” in relation to his work as an accountant.
The main debate, therefore, focused on determining whether the sum of all these problems prevented him, at least, from practicing his usual profession. To understand it in a simple way, Justice remembers that permanent disability is not valued in the abstract, but rather there is an “essential and determining character of the profession in the legal qualification”; That is, it matters how the disease directly affects the specific tasks of the job.
The TSJ values that the accounting position does not require physical effort and rules out work limitations
The court carefully analyzed how the woman’s ailments matched her daily life working with a company’s numbers. Regarding the consequences of gastric cancer, the magistrates conclude that her pathology “only limits her from carrying out activities that require intense and continuous physical effort.”
On the other hand, when addressing the demands of their work routine, the TSJ points out that the accounting profession “if there is anything characterized by it, it is for being a profession that does not require great physical effort.” That is to say, the court understands that, medically, the woman “is not incapable of exercising her usual profession, with the professionalism, performance and dedication that this may require, since she does not present functional limitations that would prevent her from doing so.” For all that, you do not have the right to permanent disability.