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Booking vacation in residency


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Hi everyone. I am an incoming PGY1 in family medicine. Just want to ask everyone on here about experience with booking vacation in residency. 

Was everyone going with a full 4 week vacation period? And if so how early in advance do you usually book? How does it affect rotation and what not? 

Thanks so much 

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Our school lets us do a "vacation block" where instead of an elective you just have that 4 weeks off if you don't take any other vacation that year. You'd have to get in contact with your PGME office relatively soon to arrange it but it should be doable as it wouldn't affect any other blocks. 

That being said, especially in first year that may not be the best idea. There are some service heavy rotations you'll probably prefer to do 3 weeks in, it can be hard to go for months and months without any break, and that elective block can be really valuable for networking/building skills/covering some weaknesses. I spread my vacation throughout the year and had some great electives and certainly don't regret it

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I'd strongly advise against doing anything more than 2 weeks of vacation at a time even if you could. As Rorzo says you'll miss those weeks when you're going for months with no break. Vacation in residency is more of a sanity preserving exercise, although you can certainly make those short weeks count.

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Thanks so much everyone. I was asking in regards of a TOTAL 4 week vacation (not continuous :)). I just wonder if everyone ends up taking a total of 4 weeks in a year. :) i heard a few residents also saying that they spread some vacation period as a few long weekends (like having a Friday off in a week they are not on call in the weekends to make a long weekend). 

 

Thanks so much again for all the responses 

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  • 11 months later...

In the PGY-1 internship year, how does vacation booking work? Do we email our own program admin or do we have to tell the scheduling person for each block we're on? It seems tough to request dates ahead of time if we don't even get our schedules for each block more than a month or two in advance.

And, is there a limit to how much time off from a block you can take? E.g. you can't just take all 4 weeks of neurosurgery off, you have to be there for >50% of the rotation, etc.

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Generally you have to request prior to the schedule being made, which is usually a month/block prior. You can take time off after but have to make your own arrangements if you're assigned for call, etc.

A common method is to first get permission from the supervisor of the rotation you're on, then your chief residents, then the program.

We're restricted to taking a max of 25% time off in a block, so for a 4 week block you can take max a week off.

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15 hours ago, garlic said:

In the PGY-1 internship year, how does vacation booking work? Do we email our own program admin or do we have to tell the scheduling person for each block we're on? It seems tough to request dates ahead of time if we don't even get our schedules for each block more than a month or two in advance.

And, is there a limit to how much time off from a block you can take? E.g. you can't just take all 4 weeks of neurosurgery off, you have to be there for >50% of the rotation, etc.

The exact protocol probably varies by place.  But for off service rotations you generally have to first get permission from the coordinator of the rotation you will be on (which can be your direct supervisor if it's a rotation where it's just you and them, or an admin if it's something big like CTU) and then from everyone else.  

In my program, we got our schedule for the whole year in terms of what rotations we were doing when (not the exact schedule of what we'd be doing, but a list of the rotations and what site we'd be at), and then we could make requests for being off call/vacation.  If you have anything like CTU, make your requests as soon as you know when, because everyone wants to take off during those rotations.

We were limited to 1 week per 4 week block.

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1 hour ago, criston said:

Would you say that it is a lot easier to book residency in community hospitals (as opposed to academic center), especially where there are not many residents? 

Ease of booking vacation is inversely correlated with how resident-dependent the service is.

If a rotation depends on residents for service, either to do call and/or to manage volumes during the day, it will be hard to get vacation.  GIM was the hardest in my PGY1 because the call was already so frequent and the teams were so busy that having residents out created coverage issues.

If a rotation is basically designed to run without residents and a resident is more of a "nice to have," it's generally no problem to get vacation approved unless the supervisor is a jerk (which can also happen).  

So community hospitals can be easier because they are often set up to run without residents anyway, but it depends on the supervisor and the specific service.

The key is just to request vacation immediately as soon as you get your schedule.  Just email the rotation admin (or whoever the contact is) with your dates right away.  I got one week off during both of my CTU blocks thankfully - I think it's the only way I survived.  That and a lot of sneaking off to the bathroom to cry.

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On 5/12/2019 at 11:51 AM, medafter30 said:

Thanks so much everyone. I was asking in regards of a TOTAL 4 week vacation (not continuous :)). I just wonder if everyone ends up taking a total of 4 weeks in a year. :) i heard a few residents also saying that they spread some vacation period as a few long weekends (like having a Friday off in a week they are not on call in the weekends to make a long weekend). 

 

Thanks so much again for all the responses 

Yes, almost everyone I know takes their full time off. The trick is to take it when you are off service on busy rotations. Don't forget your educational days, your floating holiday and lieu days too

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On 5/1/2020 at 5:35 PM, bearded frog said:

Generally you have to request prior to the schedule being made, which is usually a month/block prior. You can take time off after but have to make your own arrangements if you're assigned for call, etc.

A common method is to first get permission from the supervisor of the rotation you're on, then your chief residents, then the program.

We're restricted to taking a max of 25% time off in a block, so for a 4 week block you can take max a week off.

Thanks for the replies everyone! Family and friends are wondering when I'll come back (if ever lol), so it's great to have some details to give them.
Just so I get this straight...

1. For a rotating internship PGY-1, we won't be able to ask for vacations more than ~1 month ahead, since schedules are released prior to each block? And the process would be to email the admin/coordinator for that block only once we get an email from them first? (E.g. I know I'll be on CTU in December but I can't email the CTU coordinator now to request Christmas off)
2. What sort of activities count as "professional leave", "educational days", "floating holidays"? Are these arranged by our program/block, rather than us individual residents?
3. Must we take our vacation 1 week at a time, or can we split it like: 3 days in this block, then 4 days in another block?
4. Is 1 week counted as Mon-Sun or 7 days excluding weekends?

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30 minutes ago, garlic said:

1. For a rotating internship PGY-1, we won't be able to ask for vacations more than ~1 month ahead, since schedules are released prior to each block? And the process would be to email the admin/coordinator for that block only once we get an email from them first? (E.g. I know I'll be on CTU in December but I can't email the CTU coordinator now to request Christmas off)

Note that for us christmas/new years is separate, we all make our requests at some point and we have to work for one of the two times, christmas or new years, you can't request it off like regular time. You can ask for vacation in advance. If you know you're gonna be on CTU 4 blocks from you you can for sure reach out and ask if you can have time off. In fact thats preferred so they can account for it when they make the call schedule


2. What sort of activities count as "professional leave", "educational days", "floating holidays"? Are these arranged by our program/block, rather than us individual residents?

These are not cross-country offical designations, but generally you can request time off for exams (IE LMCC2 or boards), separate educational acitivites (like two days off to do ACLS for instance), research days, practice exams, etc. Theres also conference leave but you need approval here first. I don't know what floating holidays are. We get days in lieu when we work stat-holidays though, if that's what you mean, basically they're just extra vacation days you can count. If i start off with 10 days then take 5 days off so have 5 left, then work a stat then I now have 6 vacation days to use.


3. Must we take our vacation 1 week at a time, or can we split it like: 3 days in this block, then 4 days in another block?

Rotation/program dependant but generally no requirement on how to use them as long as you;re there for 3/4 of a block.


4. Is 1 week counted as Mon-Sun or 7 days excluding weekends?

Its counted as buisness days for us at least. Taking a friday off uses a vacation but taking a saturday off means a no-call request which isn't the same. So if you wanted say friday to the following weekends sunday (ie 9 days) you would be technically asking for a no-call weekend, 5 vacation days, and a no-call weekend. Our program is nice and automatically gives you the weekends if they approve the week but this is probably not true for every province, depends on the contract specifics.

 

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Some of the vacation details depend on location.  Here, the program is not allowed to ask you to prove what you used your educational/conference days for - so some people just use them as vacation, though I've also used them to go to conferences/trainings.  You do get separate time off for the Royal College exam.

A floating holiday is basically just a free holiday day.  It's basically the idea that you get statutory holidays off, and then your floating holiday, which is basically like picking a day to be a statutory holiday just for you.  It's part of the PARO contract that we get one per year.

All of these are arranged/requested by you, just like vacation.

A one week holiday here is 5 weekdays + one of the weekends on either side.  If you're lucky with your call requests you can get the other weekend off and have a longer holiday but you only officially get one of the weekends off of call/shift/whatever else you do on weekends.  Our program allows us to take our weeks in smaller segments if we want to now, though.

If you read your province's contract there's a lot of info in there.

You likely can't request Christmas off yet, because there's usually some sort of process for allocating that that happens later, but you can usually make vacation requests as soon as you know what dates you will be on service.

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