Note policies hurt students, public health

Requiring a doctor’s note for a bad cold wasteful

The widespread practice at Ontario colleges of requiring doctors’ notes from students who miss assignments or tests because of illness causes unnecessary stress to ill students, harms public health and wastes scarce healthcare resources.

Many cases of student illness are cold or flu, contagious diseases that do not usually require medical attention. Students with the flu or a bad cold should be at home recovering. There is very little a health-care worker can do in these cases, other than offer common sense advice.

Demanding that sick students who do not require medical attention visit a doctor’s office for the sole purpose of obtaining a sick note puts unnecessary stress on these students when they should be recovering and practicing selfcare. Students in this situation must make a decision whether to jeopardize their grades or their recovery.

Requiring sick notes from students puts the health of other patients at risk, potentially exposing them to contagious disease. People with compromised immune systems, pregnant women, young children, and elderly patients may all be at risk of serious health complications if exposed to, say, the influenza virus.

Such policies waste scarce health-care resources unnecessarily. Every appointment made for the purpose of obtaining a sick note takes an appointment away from someone who actually needs medical attention. The cost of the appointment is often covered by Ontario’s taxpayer-funded health-insurance system.

Health-care professionals are extremely reluctant to accuse patients of malingering, of faking illness. If you ask for a sick note, you almost always get one. This makes the exercise of obtaining a sick note rather a waste of time.

For the above reasons, the Ontario Medical Association has for years been asking employers to stop asking employees for sick notes. The Ontario government recently passed legislation to outlaw the practice. Let’s hope that legislation also covers post-secondary students. But it should not take legislation for Ontario colleges to do the right thing.

The reality is that some students do fake illness, and demanding sick notes from students is an attempt to address this problem. Demanding doctor’s notes, however, irresponsibly offloads a student behaviour issue onto our taxpayer-funded health-care system.

There are reasonable alternatives to a blanket policy of demanding sick notes. McMaster University, for example, has implemented a Student Absence Form (MSAF). Once a term a student may, if they need, fill out an online form to declare that they require relief from academic work for personal or medical reasons. An MSAF is not a blank cheque; there are reasonable limitations to what relief is given in this way.

There is a misperception in some quarters that McMaster’s MSAF system is rife with abuse. As someone who has taught at McMaster, I can attest that this is not the case, and the colleagues I have asked feel the same.

In my experience, students who claim illness when I suspect the issue is actually poor time management often never submit the assignment for which they are granted relief. Academic terms generally do not get easier as they go along, and these students often never catch up.

Demanding sick notes can erode the trust between students and professors. Students may feel that they are not trusted by their professors, or worse that they are simply anonymous.

Some students face barriers to securing a doctor’s appointment, whether it is lack of time, disability or mobility issues, cost of transportation, lack of insurance coverage, or indeed the illness for which they are making the appointment. Sick note requirements are a barrier to seeking extensions or other relief from academic work. This is by design.

While sick note demands are ostensibly to confirm illness, they have the secondary “benefit” of discouraging students from asking for academic relief. College professors today are extremely busy, and course schedules quite tight and unforgiving; granting students extensions can throw grit into the gears. The sick note issue is thus, in some sense, a labour conditions issue.

Many doctors charge a fee for writing a note. If Ontario colleges are going to demand sick notes from students, they should cover the cost of that fee as well as pay for appointments that are medically unnecessary rather than burden our taxpayer-funded health-care system.

Lauren Stephen has taught in the BScN program at Conestoga College and is currently a student of Software Development at Mohawk College.