our work place has a rolling 12 months allowance of 7 days for self certification. Any more than that and you have to have a doctors note.
As you can imagine, this causes issues...... for instance, i may take 2 days off work for a stinking cold, and then another couple off for a sickness bug.
that leaves me 3 days left that i am allowed to self cert so all of a sudden if i am ill again, i am in the position of needing a doctors not for something which is really trivial or risk running out of sickdays. With doctors already being massively over stretched, they do not need their time wasted by people asking for doctors notes.
So what tends to happen is people come into work with full blown manflu when really they should be home and keeping their bugs to themselves imo. They/I are/am generally unproductive and irritate the rest of the office esp those who sit near us who do not want to get ill.
luckily i do not get ill that often and usually only have 3 or 4 days a year off sick.
OTOH we used to have a member of staff who regularly would brag about going clubbing over the weekend in london or what not. her sick day was even given a name (a <insert her name here> Monday). This was before the rolling 7 days came in. I like to think we should be able to work on trust, but sadly that often does not work out well, but i do think the system we have now is a bit too harsh TBH.