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GUPTA v. NEW BRITAIN GENERAL HOSPITAL12/31/1996
resident is considered an employee or a student depends on the context in which the question [and a cause of action] arises").
In this case, the plaintiff was dismissed as a result of the hospital's decision that he was not then, and would not likely become, a safe and independent surgeon. Such a decision has little to do with the normal
attributes of an employee relationship. It implicates, instead, the academic core of the residency agreement. See Ross v. University of Minnesota, supra, 439 N.W.2d 33.
A residency training program provides medical school graduates with the clinical training necessary for board certification in specialty or subspecialty areas. See footnote 2. A residency is, in many respects, part of an educational continuum begun in medical school. See S. Reuter, "Professional Liability in Postgraduate Medical Education," 15 J. Legal Med. 485 (" esidents are physicians in transition"). The ultimate objective of the residency program is to educate the physician in the healing arts. Rather than relying on book study alone, a residency program achieves this result by involving the physician in day-to-day patient care and specialized clinical activities. Id., 487.
Residency program supervisors, like medical school professors, are responsible for evaluating a resident's progress and offering suggestions for improvement. See, e.g., D. Langsley, "Evaluation During Residency," in How to Evaluate Residents (J. Lloyd & D. Langsley, eds. 1986) pp. 11, 12. A residency committee's decision to dismiss a resident physician for poor performance in the clinic mirrors a professor's decision to fail a medical school student for poor performance in the classroom. See Ross v. University of Minnesota, supra, 439 N.W.2d 33 (" he decision to terminate a resident from a hospital-based residency program is the same as any other decision to fail a graduate student for inability to meet academic requirements"). As Justice Powell observed in Board of Curators v. Horowitz, 435 U.S. 78, 95, 98 S.Ct. 948, 55 L.Ed.2d 124 (1977) (Powell, J., concurring), " valuation of . . . performance in
the [clinical] area is no less an `academic' judgment because it involves observation of . . . skills and techniques in actual conditions of practice, rather than assigning a grade to . . . written answers on an essay question." We conclude, accordingly, that the hospital's decision to dismiss the plaintiff for poor clinical performance constituted an academic, rather than an employment, decision.
The plaintiff advances two reasons in support of his argument that his dismissal was nonetheless employment related. According to the plaintiff, the hospital is his employer, as a matter of law, because it controls his work and because it is not itself a part of a university, school or college. We disagree.
The plaintiff's first argument relies on "right to control" cases as evidence of his status as the hospital's employee. See Silverberg v. Great Southwest Fire Ins. Co., 214 Conn. 632, 639, 573 A.2d 724 (1990). We have used the "right to control" test to distinguish between an independent contractor and an employee. See, e.g., id.; Hunte v. Blumenthal, 238 Conn. 146, 154, 680 A.2d 1231 (1996). That test has no relevance, however, to the criteria for differentiation between a student and an employee. Indeed, it is a premise of the "right to control" test that what is at issue is the control of "the means and methods of work"; Silverberg v. Great Southwest Fire Ins. Co., 214 Conn. 632; thus assuming the very point that is presently at issue.
The plaintiff's second claim is that the term "hospital" cannot be defined to include "educational
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