Help Me Stay Healthy – Stay Home
It’s flu season — do
you know where your germs are? I’ll tell you where they are: over here, making
me sick!
The Ontario Medical
Association recently released a statement encouraging people to stay home when
they’re sick and asking employers to not require doctor’s notes:
Employers
should encourage workers to stay home when sick - not require sick notes which
has a discouraging effect and forces patients into the doctor’s office when
they are sick, which only encourages the spread of germs to those in the
waiting room, who in some cases are more vulnerable.
Thank you very much
OMA for this moment of sanity!
I am one of the people
who is more vulnerable. I take immunosuppressants for my RA. This combination
of RA and the Biologics medication make you vigilant to the point of paranoia.
You`re on the tail end of a cold? I don’t want to see you. You had the runs
this morning and are pretty sure it was the Indian food from yesterday? I don’t
want to see you. Your child has a runny nose? I don’t want to see you. Two
people in your office are out with the flu? I don’t want to see you.
People don’t get this.
It takes forever to train your family and friends to stay away if they or
anyone around them are sick. Many even get offended when you cancel yet again
because you don’t want to catch their cold. But there’s a very good reason for
my “silliness.”
There’s no such thing
as “just a cold” when you have an autoimmune disease and are on an
immunosuppressant. This combo means I am more likely to catch anything
contagious or develop infections. It also means that should I get sick, the
consequences are much more severe for me than for the average healthy adult.
Your cold might last a week to 10 days, make you feel kind of crappy but not
slow you down too much. If I get a cold, I’m out for at least three weeks, maybe
a few months, my RA may flare and I could develop pneumonia.
In other words: your germs
could destroy my life for months. So please help keep me healthy. Stay away
from me if you or anyone around you has been sick in the last week.
But why leave it
there? Why not help others stay healthy, too?
Once upon a time in
the 1990s, I worked in an office. One of the older admin assistants had a
stellar attendance record. She’d had no sick days for a few decades. Lest you
think she had an ironclad immune system, I should mention that she did catch
colds and flus just like the rest of humanity. The only difference was that she
didn’t call in sick. She came to work, no matter how sick she was, soldiering
through being at death’s door. Somehow,
this accomplished her being seen as a role model for the rest of the office and
the attendance program in general.
I was too young and
too junior to opine loudly that the Emperor had no clothes (yes, of course I
can connect this to a Danish fairy tale…). Because no one ever talked about how
her coming to work while sick would inevitably set in motion a domino effect whereby
the other 23 people in the office would catch the virus. And because this one
woman refused to take one or two sick days, the rest of the staff would require
10-15 sick days.
One of the ongoing
challenges of every organization out there is to manage absenteeism. To this
end, it’s common to have absentee policies, whereby employees who call in sick
too often find themselves in their manager’s office, having conversations and
being monitored in the future. Some companies don’t have paid sick time at all.
And in my obviously not-so-humble opinion, this is insane.
Going to work when you’re
sick has two consequences. One, you’re sick longer because you’re not taking
care of yourself. Two, have you ever seen Contagion? You pass the virus to
easily half of the people in your office and as in my example above, one person
dragging themselves to work when sick will cost another 10 sick days. This is
not cost-effective. And it’s more than that. Because this one person passes the
virus to the other people in the workplace, who pass it to their families, who
pass it to their colleagues and friends and this is how half the country is prostrate
with flu every winter! It's like that shampoo commercial, only with more tissues, coughing fits and death. Death? Yup. Because the flu can be deadly to people who are vulnerable, such as seniors and oh, yeah. People with compromised immune systems.
Isn’t it time we stop
this madness? I have a few suggestions:
Take a broader look at
absenteeism policies. Yes, it’s important that your employees come to work, but
if the cost of that is that more employees call in sick, perhaps the policy isn’t
working.
Less focus on
employees physically being at work. Whenever possible, telecommuting should be
available. Join the 21st century! Encourage your employees to work
from home unless there’s an important reason for them to be at the office. There
are a gazillion studies that show working from home can make you more
productive. It can also be a real benefit for people who aren’t feeling well, whose
children are sick or who have other obligations that need their attention.
For those people who can’t
telecommute — attendants, mechanics, factory workers, doctors, firefighters — provide
masks and encourage use of them.
Set up regional
offices for doctor’s notes. As one of the commenters on this news story suggested,
they should be paid for by employers that require said doctor’s notes. Sharing
the expense would make it less costly for individual companies, while relieving
the strain on the healthcare system. Having central locations also keeps more
people with colds and flus away from doctor’s offices, thus helping to curtail
the spread of these seasonal viruses.
Maybe we’d all be
healthier if we used the model of protecting people whose health is vulnerable
to everyone.
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