How Leave Works

You request your own annual leave, your study leave, and your Educational Development Time. Morag gets informed by HR how much annual leave you are entitled to according to your grade and seniority and this is not usually rolled over into the subsequent year of employment. *

You need to take a pro-rata portion of your annual leave in each quarter. Certainly when you are on an intensive care block for a period of time, you must take the pro-rata amount of leave according to the time spent in intensive care. No more, and no less. Intensive Care days being longer, taking one off does eat up something like 1.3 “days” of annual leave. Morag deals with this calculation.

If you do not request the leave, you do not take the leave. No one else is going to notice. I am not going to allocate you annual leave. In such a situation, you would not be paid for the extra work you would do purely as a result of your own lack of administrative organisation. In fact, paradoxically, despite your pro-bono contribution to the running of the NHS, it would not make you look particularly good, so do take your leave. Look after yourself.

It is perfectly reasonable if you are not so bothered about specific dates, to send a request such as “please can I have any two consecutive weeks in November” or “please give me a week this Winter” or some such.

Once you join the OOH rota after 12 months of theatre anaesthesia, there will be a maximum number of you who can be off at the same time. At that seniority, requests for long consecutive periods of leave get forwarded to your colleagues to check that they don’t cause trouble before they are approved. Your first year is more flexible and we tend to expect the novices to take a week or two off around Christmas. Who knows when you’ll next have that opportunity.

Usually you should apply 6 weeks in advance but there is some flexibility here.

For Annual leave – get in touch with our departmental secretary Morag Ritchie.

* You have a right to request to carry up to 5 days annual leave into the subsequent year. This does not include time off in lieu of working public holidays. If you want to carry some days you need to request to do so in advance by email and wait for HR to agree. You can’t carry leave between health boards.

Study Leave

For Study leave – You apply separately for the budget on Turas, and the time away from service (via Morag in the same way as you do annual leave.)

Regardless of how much study budget you have already spent, do apply for funding using TURAS. After the first £600 or so you’ll no doubt get a warning that there may not be budget for the current course. This is true, so you do have to budget as though you are paying for it personally. However around February or March time, at Core Training level there is almost always budget left for these requests so check back in Turas in the Spring to see if you can get the money after all, and keep receipts just in case that happens. The reason for this extra budget is that not all your colleagues will use up their share.

You are entitled to 30 days Study leave per year (pro rata for LTFT) and 5 days of this is top sliced for your attendance to departmental tutorials.

An idea of which courses are likely to attract study leave within this deanery will be found on the North of Scotland School of Anaesthesia TEAM Sharepoint. And there are more details there about Study Leave in general.

A notable recent change is that 5 days of private study leave would be approved prior to each sitting of each part of an exam.

Anaesthesia and ACCS trainees are entitled to Educational Development Time. This is separate from Study leave and should not be used where Study Leave is more appropriate. Often EDT is completed within the hospital rather than Leave per se – see the specific document about EDT.

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