Disclosure

Unless you’re working in certain healthcare professions, there’s absolutely no requirement for you to tell your employer that you’re HIV-positive.

Nevertheless, you may choose to tell your employer in the hope that this will lead to a more supportive working environment. However, you may prefer to keep information about your health confidential in order to avoid discrimination or having to deal with colleagues' attitudes towards HIV.

If you need time off because of illness or for hospital appointments think about how you are going to explain this without disclosing your HIV status.

HIV testing

There’s no law to stop an employer asking for an HIV test as part of a company medical for new employees. However, they’ve no right to see the result of the test result without your consent.

The only way an employer can ask an existing employee to take an HIV test is if the initial terms and conditions of a job said that this would be the case.

Employment rights

The Disability Discrimination Act provides important workplace protection to people with HIV from the moment of their HIV diagnosis. These rights are on top of those provided by other legislation.

Basically, it is unlawful for an employer with 15 or more employees to:

• Discriminate against an HIV-positive person in recruitment and selection unless this can be ‘justified’.

• Give an HIV-positive person less favourable treatment (including access to promotion, training and transfers, as well as dismissal and selection for redundancy) unless this can be ‘justified’.

• Fail to make ‘reasonable’ adjustments to the work environment to enable an HIV-positive person to work.

Can my employer sack me because I'm ill due to HIV?

UK Government guidelines in the booklet AIDS and the Workplace state that:

“HIV infection alone does not affect people's ability to do their job until they develop illnesses that make them unfit... If they later become ill, they should be treated like anyone else with a life-threatening illness. Only if their illness affects their ability to do the job should their employer seek medical advice.”

The only way this advice will have changed since the Disability Discrimination Act is that the employer must have considered reasonable adjustments before dismissing you as a result of HIV-related illness.

If you are dismissed because you are unable to do the job, the employer must have sufficient evidence upon which to base that decision. This involves, preferably, both a report from the employee's doctor and an examination by a doctor on behalf of the employer.

If you are physically unable to carry out your contractual job, then the employer should consider the possibility of a move to different duties. The likelihood of there being suitable alternative employment will depend largely on the size of the firm involved. Furthermore, there is no duty for the employer to create alternative employment.

Seek legal advice if your employer is causing you difficulties in relation to time off for sickness.