Rights re maternity/paternity leave during residency

[dearsir]

Hello,

For a surgical resident, what is the official policy regarding taking maternity leave during residency? Heard some say 6 weeks total, but does that include your vacation time? So if you took a total of 2 weeks of vacation some time during the academic year prior to delivering, then you would only get 4 weeks of maternity leave post-delivery?

And same question regarding paternity leave? How many weeks does a father get?

Thanks everyone.

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[akwho]

I'm in a surgical sub. Blue collar program overall but we are pretty generous with maternity/paternity leave.

The one woman in our program who had a baby got 3 months off. One of those was her scheduled research month so essentially took 2 extra months off.
The fathers in our program get 2 weeks paternity leave. (think 4 weeks would be more fair, but oh well.)

 

[armybound]

I was told I could take my remaining vacation time for the year plus 2 weeks.

 

[LucidSplash]

Hello,

For a surgical resident, what is the official policy regarding taking maternity leave during residency? Heard some say 6 weeks total, but does that include your vacation time? So if you took a total of 2 weeks of vacation some time during the academic year prior to delivering, then you would only get 4 weeks of maternity leave post-delivery?

And same question regarding paternity leave? How many weeks does a father get?

Thanks everyone.

This is going to be program dependent except for the following: the ABS requires 48 weeks per year of time on service. So the maximum amount of time per year you can take off without having to add time onto residency is 4 weeks.

How exactly your program/GME office deals with accounting for the actual time is left to the individual program. Most female residents I know took a max of 4 weeks to avoid tacking in time to residency. Some programs will get creative in which rotations you are on to make it easier, others will not. You will need to see if there is a precident in your program or if you are the one creating the precident.

Also my program had no formal paternity leave. Mostly we just informally helped the guy out and swapped calls for him the first week after his wife gave birth.

 

[Dr.LeoSpaceman]

This is going to be program dependent except for the following: the ABS requires 48 weeks per year of time on service. So the maximum amount of time per year you can take off without having to add time onto residency is 4 weeks.

Technically it's 48 weeks averaged over the first 3 and then final 2 years. So you can get to 6 weeks without adding time by using 4 weeks of vacation from one year and 2 weeks from the following year. But agree it's all program dependent. Our program allowed 6 weeks for maternity, and 2 weeks for paternity.

 

[deleted480308]

Are you willing to add time to your residency end date? And have you already used the vacation?

 

[deleted547339]

Not a surgeon, but as a CCM fellow, I got 0 paternity time. I used my 2 weeks vacation for the year and that was is.

 

[DoctwoB]

Also used my vacation time for paternity (1 week), but personally I think it’s BS not to have more. I don’t blame my program per se, their concerns, in addition to acgme restrictions, are that in a small residency one resident being off for a while means dumping more work on the others, creating more hours violations. The problem is with GME in general, where academic departments with residency programs operate essentially with a skeleton crew, with residents being essential in all facets to keep it running. There should be some level of built in redundancy (NPs for floor coverage, etc) for things like this and other issues that can arise (health problems, resident turnover, etc).