You may be weighing up the pros and cons of telling your employer about your HIV diagnosis.
Disclosure may not be a good idea if you think your employer might treat the information insensitively or if you think personal information could be made public, or that you may suffer discrimination.
On the other hand if your employer is supportive it could be easier to make changes to your workload, to have time off for appointments or to deal with periods of sickness.
When applying for jobs, there may be questions on the application form about whether you have a medical condition. If you lie and they later find out you have HIV, this is called a breach of mutual trust and you could lose the job. As an alternative you could try as tactfully as possible to avoid the question:
- You could leave that part of the form blank, and wait to see if they come back to you for an answer.
- You could decline to give sensitive personal data which is protected by the Data Protection Act. To be consistent, you could withhold your ethnic group as well as health information.
- If pressed for more information, you could ask your doctor to write a letter confirming that you will be able to do the job, without mentioning that your condition is HIV.
However, you need to be aware that doing these things might put you at a disadvantage in the competitive employment market.
If you choose to disclose your HIV status, it is worth knowing that people with HIV are protected under the Equality Act 2010. The Data Protection Act also states that records of your HIV status must be kept confidential.
If you work in healthcare you are obliged to inform your occupational health physician that you are HIV positive and to avoid performing invasive procedures.
For further information see our At work pages and the Work Life website.