Feel free to delete if this isn’t the right place to post this but I’ve seen this sub do great things and I don’t know who else to ask.
So for context I’m 22F and working in a school in London – support staff, not a teacher. The past few months I’ve been getting ill often, and quite severely, so I’ve now gone over my 10 sick days. I’ve had blood tests and I’m in the process of investigating the issue as I had health issues as a teenager so there is some concern for my health there, but today we’ve had a meeting with a HR officer and my line manager to talk about it. The tone of the whole meeting was not the nicest – I know being off sick is really inconvenient to people in my department and the school in general, but it felt like there was zero empathy for how it might feel to be constantly unwell and it’s not something I’m doing on purpose. There’s this constant implication that getting sick is a moral failing, despite the fact that I’ve communicated that I’m trying to solve the issue.
In this meeting they’ve flagged up that I’ve had a few days off around weekends or holidays. I’ve noticed the pattern too and they asked why I thought it was happening. I said that, aside from sheer bad luck, maybe it was to do with the fact I tend to see friends and family on weekends as I don’t get time in the week and maybe I’m picking up viruses etc from them, but I’m not sure. The HR officer was then explaining to me our next steps, one of which will be discussing what we can do to mitigate illness once I’ve had my doctor’s appointment and we have a bit more info, and she implied pretty heavily that one of their expectations of me will be to “make a call about continuing to see people on weekends in order to limit the sickness”. She spoke a little more in very roundabout corporate terminology but it sounded overall like the school might expect me not to have a social life in order to not catch illness? This seems a) incredibly unrealistic and maybe not even helpful – I don’t know where I’m catching illnesses from, and I do work in a school which is a hotbed for sickness – and b) extremely unfair and a great way to guarantee isolation and burnout. I’m a very social person and the idea of a life of work and absolutely nothing else just fills me with dread, as I’m sure it would most people.
Is this something they can ask me to do? How do I tell them that I won’t be isolating myself from the world? I also live with 4 other adults who have full time jobs and active social lives and I won’t be asking them to change their behaviour nor am I in any position to move out.