the more I read and begin to understand about this, the more it seems very unethical to say the least.
As several have pointed out above, attendance officers are not medical at all. They are not welfare, they are not neutral.
Generally they make parents and kids lives hell.
I am very puzzled by this method of recruiting patients.
Is this ever heard of for other childhood diseases?
What makes them assume that unauthoried absent is down to illness or health issues. Most are not. otherwised they would be authorised.
If parents have a child who is sick with ME, most parents would be worrying like crazy what is wrong with the child and taking them to the doctor many times, they would likely to be discussing with the teacher or schools their concern about their child's health, that they are sick and possibly that doctors don't know whats wrong.
I don't get how trawling unexplained absence picks up ME. I just don't buy it.
Do they do this for depression? asthma? gluten intolerance? anaemia?
or anything else health related. they don't even trawl for head lice anymore, in fact if a child has head lice, the teacher can not even tell the child or parent but has to send an indiscriminate letter to all class parents just asking all parents to check their kid's hair for head lice as there has been a case in class.
It seems to me that this was about recruiting for trials that she was perhaps struggling to recruit for and trying to find evidence that would keep her in a job and grow her clinic and justify funding, because so many kids have ME and she knows best how to treat them, when in actual fact a good proportion probably had depression, nutritional deficiencies or too many late nights on the Xbox.
The other thing that seems rather odd is that if they wanted to identify kids who potentially had ME, surely the school nurse or even local gp clinics would be better equipped to know who is not attending school because they are feeling unwell as opposed to identifying all kids indiscriminately through attendance records. So kids who for many good reasons may hate school, or have been bullied, or have school anxiety or a million other reasons, such as having to care for a parent or sibling are called to one of these meetings to be interrogated on whether they may have ME.