With the click of a button, students, faculty and staff at universities across Canada can now report their illness-related absences online. Universities in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Calgary currently have systems up and running.

At the beginning of November, the University of Manitoba implemented its own system that allows students and staff to self-report their illnesses. A student who is experiencing flu-like symptoms is encouraged to report their sickness using a their JUMP accounts.

After logging on and locating the illness-reporting channel on the “home” tab, students can press the “I am Sick” button, which will be followed by an automated “thank you” message. Students are recorded as absent until they are well, at which time they should click the “I am Feeling Better” button, before returning to class.

While the majority of universities are using the online tool specifically to track the spread of influenza, the U of M is more concerned with obtaining data on the student absenteeism rate.

“Since we don’t take attendance in classrooms, we have no effective or centralized way of knowing what the absenteeism rate is among students, so that’s really the primary reason why this system was implemented,” said Kenton Friesen, emergency management coordinator at the U of M.

“The incentive for students is to know that they’re contributing to the overall management of this issue with the university,” said Friesen.

After a user clicks the “sick” button, the system confirms whether the person is staff or a student and records the date and time in a file, he explained. Using the student’s or employee’s ID number, it queries through the system to find out what faculty the person is with, returns that information and clears the ID number.

“We don’t record the student number,” said Friesen. “There’s no personal information in any of the files.”

Friesen said he receives the cumulative data on a daily basis.

“I’ll summarize it by day, so I can trend and graph the information to know, in total, how many are sick, how many are well and what faculty is being impacted more than others,” he said.

He recognizes that in order to eliminate potential errors in the data, what is most important is for more people to become aware of the system.

According to their websites, both the University of Waterloo and McMaster University have occupational health nurses monitoring the online reports on a daily basis in order to react if necessary.

However, the University of Manitoba’s Environmental Safety Office is more concerned with using the system to reveal trends over a longer period of time, rather than figures from individual days, said Friesen.

“To do proper public health surveillance, we would need a lot more data,” he said.

Dr. Pierre-Paul Tellier is a physician and associate professor of family medicine and director of Student Health Services at McGill. He believes that the self-reporting system, put in place at McGill a couple of weeks ago strictly for the flu, is a useful tool.

“The purpose is essentially to tell students that if they’re sick they should stay at home and take care of themselves and not infect others,” said Tellier.

Tellier said that the online system facilitates the process for sick students, who no longer have to worry about going to Student Health Services to get a sick note.

If a student reports flu-like symptoms, the system sends the information to the Student Affairs office and automatically starts calculating a time off — which is approximately nine days for students in non-clinical placements. If a student isn’t feeling better after nine days, then it is a way of telling them they need to get into a clinic to be assessed, said Tellier.

According to U of M’s policies, students are usually required to inform their instructors of their absence and also bring in a doctor’s note to confirm that they were sick.

While the new self-reporting system cannot be used to officially replace a doctor’s note, it aims to recognize the impacts of the pandemic.

“The doctors are already overwhelmed with patients. If we require all our students to get doctors’ notes, we’ll bog down the healthcare system even more than it is now,” said Friesen.

Friesen said the system will be up till at least the end of the winter term.

“We are actually going to start thinking of how it could be used in the future, so naturally it’s going to need to evolve.”