in which they work." A decade later, Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District had extended that protection to an employee speaking privately to a superior about such issues. The most important precedent for Churchill's case was 1983's Connick v. Myers, where the Court had upheld the dismissal of an assistant district attorney who had circulated questionnaires among her coworkers about office policy and named superiors in the wake of a transfer she had resisted. In that case the deciding issue had been that the questionnaire had largely concerned matters of personal, not public, concern. Coffey quoted that case's holding that courts "must determine the content, form, and context of a given statement, as revealed by the whole record." Circuit precedent, from shortly after Connick, held that the content of the speech was the most important of those three. Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the appeals court could not make a determination as to the content of the disputed speech. Instead, Coffey wrote, it would rule on the status of Churchill's speech, reviewing the record and considering it in the light most favorable to her, as the party in opposition to the motion for summary judgement. "It is evident that the District Court's grant of summary judgment was in error," wrote Coffey. In her deposition, Churchill had discussed at length her criticisms of how cross-training had been implemented, and her concerns that the policy requiring a shower and change of clothes for nurses returning to the obstetric ward from another department was a possible violation of state regulations. "She was undoubtedly speaking about a matter of public concern", the judge concluded. He chastised the hospital for its apparent violations, quoting from and discussing at length the standards of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations on cross-training to demonstrate that this was a matter of public concern. "[T]he content of the speech is a question of fact for the jury," Coffey concluded. Coffey turned next to the context, addressing Mihm's holding that under the Pickering balancing test, the hospital was permitted to fire Churchill because her speech was sufficiently disruptive to it even if it had been on a matter of public concern. It was erroneous, he wrote, because it ignored Jean Welty's testimony that had corroborated Churchill's account of the conversation. Further, she had professional obligations to act under the code of the American Nursing Association,