Annual leave and absence: keeping a vet practice rota fair.

A request deadline, and a published calendar.

Almost no leave dispute is about dates. It is about when people talk about them. With no deadline, whoever emails first takes the August week and everyone else finds out when the rota appears. The fix is dull and works: a request calendar published at the start of the year, with three windows.

• Summer (June to September): requests by 15 March, written answer by 15 April.
• Christmas and New Year: requests by 15 October, answer by 1 November.
• The rest of the year: four weeks before the date asked for, answer within a week.

Set the answer date as firmly as the deadline. A request made in March and settled in June stops everyone booking anything, and turns a benefit into a worry.

How many people off at once: the number that holds the practice.

“Two people off at most” is too blunt for a practice: what counts is not the headcount but what those people take with them. So set the cap per team and per skill. Picture a practice with 5 vets and 6 vet nurses, where only two vets operate and only one nurse runs imaging.

That last line is the lesson. A skill held by one person makes their leave impossible to grant without closing something. Train a second person, line up a locum, or decide in advance that the service pauses: all three stand up. Discovering the question on 2 August does not.

Then set the floor that goes with it: the minimum cover for each day, and for each shift if you work in time slots.

The weeks everyone wants go on rotation.

Three periods cause nearly every disagreement: Christmas week, New Year week, and two or three weeks in August. No objective criterion settles them once and for all, so the only answer that lasts is a multi-year rotation, kept in a table the team can see: the year, who had Christmas, who had New Year.

Two safeguards: count the two holidays separately, or the same people will always take the easier one; and anyone who swaps their turn keeps their place for next year, or nobody will ever swap again. For summer, rotate weeks, not months.

Announce the arbitration rule before you arbitrate.

When two requests clash, someone decides. An arbitration explained in advance can be argued with; the same one explained afterwards is simply endured. Write the order of criteria on one page, before the first request of the year: cover first (if the week drops below the floor, it is not granted); then rotation (whoever missed out last year goes ahead); then anything your contracts or staff handbook set out; and first come, first served last, which is a fair tie-breaker and a terrible main rule. Answer in writing, refusals included, and say which criterion decided.

Unplanned absence: decide once, not every morning.

Sickness, a child at home: the event cannot be planned, but the response can. Write the order of fallbacks once and apply it without renegotiating: postpone the day’s non-urgent work, call the volunteer list with the agreed payment, bring in a locum already registered with access and rates settled, and pause one named service with a client message ready to send.

For a long absence, do not patch day by day: rebuild the whole month. Three weeks off move the on-call nights, the rest that follows them and the fairness counters. Fair night on-call explains how that evens out over several months rather than the next one.

What Djed does with leave and absence.

The decisions stay yours. Here is what Djed, the vet rota software, does with them:

• An absence takes one sentence. You tell the agent “Marc is on leave from the 19th to the 23rd”; it prepares a card showing exactly what will change, and your click on Confirm is what records it. Nothing moves without that click.
• The team requests from their phone. In the iPhone app everyone sees their days and their on-call, books leave and offers a swap; a notification goes out when the month is published.
• The hard rules you set (days off, limits, rest after on-call, closures) are never broken by the engine. An approved absence is a day the person is not assigned, and the whole month is rebuilt around it, on-call included.
• The copilot flags days that are short of cover before it bites: the week where three absences collide shows on screen, not at the front desk the night before. See the copilot and day-to-day work.
• On-call keeps a twelve-month memory: a month away is not paid back in nights the month after.
• A published month is locked: leave granted afterwards is handled on a reopened rota, never quietly.

Two limits, plainly. Djed does not keep your leave balances: it builds the rota around the absences you approve. And it guesses no cap on simultaneous absences: that job belongs to the cover you have described, by day or by shift. Vet nurses have their own shifts and counters, which is the point of the vet nurse and vet rota guide.

Where the rules come from.

• Ireland. Statutory annual leave is 4 working weeks for a full leave year (section 19 of the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997). The employer decides when leave is taken, after consulting the employee or their union at least a month beforehand, taking account of the needs of the business and of the employee’s family responsibilities and rest; leave is taken within the leave year, or within 6 months after it with the employee’s consent (section 20).
• Great Britain. Statutory annual leave is 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days (regulations 13 and 13A of the Working Time Regulations 1998). A worker gives notice of at least twice the length of the leave; the employer can refuse by counter-notice at least as long as the leave, or require leave to be taken with notice of twice its length (regulation 15). Northern Ireland has its own regulations, with the same entitlement.
• What the law does not say. Nothing fixes a maximum number of people off at once, a Christmas rotation or a request deadline. Those are organisation, which is exactly why they should be written down. Contracts and staff handbooks may give more than the statutory minimum: check yours.

Sources and date checked.

• Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, revised edition (sections 19 and 20).
• Working Time Regulations 1998 (SI 1998/1833), regulations 13, 13A and 15.
• No law sets a cap on simultaneous absences or a rotation rule: the method described here is a way of organising.

Texts checked on 12 October 2026. This guide is not legal advice: for your own situation, speak to your HR or employment adviser.