Weekend Call-offs and Vacations

[fuzzywuzzy, CNA]

If you call off on a weekend, does your facility require you to make it up the following weekend?

Mine has that policy, so people rarely call off then (unless they are one of the few people that work every weekend). But we get a lot of call-offs on 3-11 Friday nights, because those don't count as the weekend so they don't need to be made up. Monday on first shift is the same way... people who had Sat and Sun off decide to stretch it out another day

Also, does your facility allow you to use vacation days on the weekend or are you supposed to find your own coverage?

And how stingy is your facility with the vacation time? Where I work it's like pulling teeth trying to get them to give you the time that you're entitled to. There is a cap on the amount of time we can accumulate and after that if we don't use it we stop accumulating... but we can never use it!

[NightNerd, MSN, RN]

When I started reading this post, I was like, "Holy cow. I wish we'd do that at my job."

Buuuuut then I kept reading. It doesn't seem like an effective policy, given the Friday/Monday issue, and then if you extended it to, "Any time you call off, you have to make up a shift," there's really no point in having sick days or vacation time at all. And that's not cool. We have to be able to provide a doctor's note basically whenever it is asked for, which seems fair to me.

We are allowed to use our vacation days on weekends, but we have to request off so early that it can be hard to get the time we need. It gets more complicated because our unit is super-small (only 10 beds), so there aren't a lot of employees here to cover every time someone wants to take off. It can get sticky. Usually they work with us if we request far enough in advance; it's just hard when two people request off at the same time.

[Abigail612]

At my facilty they say you are suppose to make it up but they rarely enforce it because alot people come up with excuses why they cann't make it up.

At my facility we can have weekends requested off for vacations as long as you tell them before the schedual for the next month comes out, somethimes in order to cover it they may ask you to cover the next weekend but I figure its not that big of a deal.

[chorkle]

LTC facility I worked at, refused to accept call-offs; if you couldn't make it in to work, you were required to find your own coverage, regardless of the reason, or the timing. (Obviously, this didn't happen all the time.)

And, your replacement could not be working overtime. Since most employees were full time, and there were only a few part time people, you can figure out how well this policy worked. If your replacement was late, YOU were charged with being late. If your replacement left early, YOU were charged with leaving early (for which the penalty was (supposed to be) instant termination.)

Some things were, ah, difficult there.

[fuzzywuzzy, CNA]

^Yeah that's how i feel about our vacation time. They never approve vacation days, so it's pretty much up to you to find someone to cover for you, but everyone is already full time, so that gets denied too. And that's if you can find someone to do it. Most of the time if you need a day off most of the staff is already working that day.

[mindyfromcali]

I've had issues with that at all of my facilities, except one. That particular facility, you had to call the DON or ADON no matter what time of day or night to call in sick. Then you had to bring a doctor's note in to back up calling off. Not many people calling sick at that facility unless they were actually sick. They also had a lot of CNAs working PRN and they would actually call them in to cover and they would say yes every time.