Medical Excuse Policy
The Health Center does not provide medical excuses for students who miss work, classes, assignments, or tests secondary to short-term illness, injury, or mental health problems. Part of the Health Center’s mission is to promote health education, which includes educating our students to be wise consumers of healthcare. The requirement of an excusal note encourages students to seek medical care for any illness when self-care is appropriate.
Students seeking unneeded care for the purposes of “getting a note” to be excused from class or work have unintended effects.
- Doing so can create an overload on our services, limiting access to others.
- Doing so can increase exposure to communicable illnesses.
- Seeking care in the Health Center after the illness has improved to get an excusal note, the provider has no verifiable way of knowing if the student was ill or incapacitated, relying solely on the student’s history. As medical and mental health professionals, we take the students’ reports as the truth.
- The student may fabricate illnesses or exaggerate symptoms to obtain a note, and then that report becomes a permanent part of their medical or mental health record.
- Requiring a visit to the Student Health Center to obtain an excusal note places an unnecessary burden on the student and providers.
Many students state that an instructor or employer requires written or specific medical/psychological information to be excused from a class. Requiring a student to share this private information compromises patient confidentiality and creates a problem with how that information may be shared with others.
For these reasons, we feel the decision to excuse a student from class and work should be based on a conversation between the student and the instructor/employer, without requiring a provider to become involved.
The Berry College Care Team is available to support students who experience a health-related incident, accident or illness that results in missing an extended period of time from class.