Introduction:
In an effort to reconcile the needs of faculty members to schedule time off for vacation or meetings as far in advance as possible with the needs of the Department to provide clinical and academic services, we need to clarify the rules and procedures governing vacation time requests and approvals. This scheduling system should have, above all, clear and fair rules that apply to everybody. Also, the system should be easy to access (to check the status of a request or the availability of a certain date), should provide flexibility to make travel plans in advance, and should have transparency with clear recordkeeping and overt approvals and refusals.
In an effort to satisfy these goals, below is the proposed Vacation Policy for the Department of Anesthesiology, University of Utah Health Sciences Center .
1- By University Policy, eligible faculty members are entitled to 25 days of vacation leave per year; days of vacation do not include weekends or holidays. For purposes of fulfilling department clinical responsibilities, other time not available for clinical assignment must be included in scheduling decisions (see 12).
2- Faculty members of the Department of Anesthesiology can take vacation time as long as approved by the Scheduling Coordinator and/or the Chairman.
3- Due to clinical coverage needs, only a limited number of faculty members can be on vacation at any time. The number of positions available for faculty members to take vacation at any given week will be determined in advance by the Scheduling Coordinator and the Chairman based on existing personnel resources, clinical obligations and academic duties. This number will be posted in the Department's intranet as far in advance as possible.
4- Scheduling of vacation time can be done up to two years in advance. Priority will be given to earlier requests (first come, first serve). If a given week is full, faculty can sign up in a 'waiting list' for approval by the Scheduling Coordinator if resources become available.
5- Each faculty member can have up to 25 weekdays of vacation time booked at any given time.
6- Approved vacation requests can only be cancelled by the interested faculty member and up to the time the provisional OR monthly schedule is published.
7- An approved request cannot be denied at a later date.
8- Appeals will be handled by the Chairman.
9- Weekends and holidays can be requested off with the OR monthly schedule requests.
10- The Holiday Lottery (published separately) assignments have precedence over vacation requests and OR monthly schedule requests.
11- Vacation time during the major national anesthesia meetings (ASA, IARS, SCA) will be granted only if attending those meetings. Priority will be given to faculty with presentation or committee obligations at the meeting, provided they submit a request with reasonable advance notice. Faculty with submitted abstracts pending acceptance will have priority over other requests up to the time the accepted abstracts are announced (i.e. early June for the October ASA meeting)
12- Out-of-town or off-campus academic obligations (e.g., attendance at state/national society meetings as a delegate, visiting professorships, scientific society committee meetings, research study planning meetings, lectures at major anesthesia meetings, industry consulting meetings regarding collaborative research projects, editorial activities, etc.) are part of the department's non-clinical missions and are distinguished from vacation time. Such obligations require advance confirmation that leave is available. Assuming that the participant uses non-clinical time that is already provided for in the department's staffing needs projection process, time away for such obligations can typically be accommodated through the monthly scheduling process. The scheduler should be made of aware of such requests as early as possible so that confirmation for such leave can be granted beforehand and other necessary arrangements made.
13- New faculty cannot make vacation requests until formalizing in writing the employment commitment.
14- A system will be designed and implemented to clearly display the schedule of vacation requests, assignments, status of requests and availability in the Department's intranet. Also, a system to request vacation time on-line will be considered.
15- Until such system is in place, all vacation requests will be made in writing , clearly indicating the days requested off as well as the date of the request , along with the faculty member's signature . Once approved by the Scheduling Coordinator, a signed copy will be returned to the faculty member and the original approved request will be stored with the Department and will be available for other faculty members to review.
16- Summer Months : The Department will do its very best to insure that each faculty member have at least two weeks of vacation time during the summer months (June, July and August). A meeting will be conducted as far in advance as practical to determine the distribution of the vacation slots for the following summer. At the meeting, a random drawing will determine the order in which faculty members will choose his/her weeks, using the descending order for the first week and the ascending order for the second one. Faculty members can give away or trade their allocated summer vacation weeks. The scheduling coordinator will be notified of all changes.
