USAP Partner Vacation Policy

1. Vacation Allowance

• • Each physician's allowance is set individually. From the 2028 season it is counted in days: partners receive 50 days and associates 40, multiplied by their FTE. An associate becomes a partner on their partner date (normally three years after their hire date), and that year is prorated: associate days before the date, partner days from it. The draw hands out whole weeks (a week costs 5 × FTE days); any days left over are arranged with the office after the draw.

• • Your allowance for the year appears on Home and on the Draw Board.

• • Administrators may hand-set a different allowance (in days) for one physician, for example for someone who joins or leaves partway through the year. That exception is shown as such and stays until an administrator returns the physician to the standard rule.

• • If your allowance looks wrong, have it corrected before the draw begins.

2. Who Takes Part

• • Active partners and associates with an allowance for the year take part in the draw.

• • Some physicians may draw in a separate pool. Each pool has its own draw order and its own weeks, and you pick only from your pool.

3. Draw Order

• • Each year the physicians who held seats 1–5 in the previous order move to the bottom, keeping their order; everyone else moves up five places. The rotation counts last year's seat numbers, so it does not depend on who has since left.

• • Physicians who retired or left are removed and the order closes up.

• • New physicians join at the end of the line: new partners first, then new associates, each group ordered by a published, seeded lottery. From the next year they rotate like everyone else.

• • Administrators announce the lottery seed before setting the order. The seed, every ticket and how each seat was placed are shown in the Draw Guide.

• • Any later change to the published order is recorded in the audit log.

4. How Turns Work

• • The draw is a snake: the order runs forward in the first round, reverses in the second, and keeps alternating.

• • Each turn you select two different full weeks, or one week if only one remains in your allowance or on the board.

• • Your two weeks can be any available weeks, including back-to-back weeks.

• • The draw continues until everyone has used their full allowance. There is no fixed number of rounds; a 10-week allowance takes five turns.

• • You can undo your most recent turn within 10 minutes, as long as it is still your turn.

• • If your turn time runs out, an administrator may skip your turn so the draw can continue. If your priority weeks are set to backup, the draw picks your top open priority weeks instead. Otherwise, pick your weeks on the Draw Board as soon as you return, without waiting for the current turn to end. A skipped turn can be made up at any time, even after your own turn comes around again: you make up the skipped turn first, then take your regular turn. Weeks that fill while you are skipped are gone.

Priority weeks

• • On My Weeks, every week you add is one of your priority weeks. Put them in the order you want, best first, and optionally label one Must have or Want and add a private note. Only you see your labels and notes; administrators see which weeks you chose and their order.

• • Off: your priority weeks are a wishlist only. Backup: the draw picks your top open priority weeks only if your time runs out. Autopilot: the draw picks them as soon as your turn starts.

• • Each turn it takes your top priority weeks that are still open. If not enough of them are open, you pick by hand as usual. You get an email whenever it picks for you.

• • Avoid is a reminder only. The draw only ever picks your priority weeks, so it never picks a week you marked Avoid.

5. Weeks and Open Slots

• • Vacation weeks run Sunday through Saturday.

• • Each week has a limited number of open slots, shown on the Draw Board. A week is closed once its slots are full.

• • Holiday and summer weeks are labeled on the board, but they follow the same rules as every other week.

2027 High-Demand Weeks

6. After the Draw

• • You can share a week with another physician by proposing a split on My Weeks. A split divides the Monday-Friday days of the two weeks, and takes effect only when the other physician accepts.

• • Splits are not available while the draw is running.

• • Any other change to a selected week is made by an administrator.

7. Questions

Last Revised: September 27, 2026 | Version 3.0