How to handle establish a PDO policy for merging medical practices, on

[Guest Linda Wallace]

We are two large medical practices merging to form a large medical practice with approximatley 100-125 employees. One practice has a formal PDO policy established approximately five years ago. The other practice does not allow for accrual of PDO.

Practice A

No formal PDO policy. Does not allow for accrual of either sick leave or vacation time. Employees are allocated ten sick leave and ten vacation days annually. At a certain point during the year, employees may sell back any unused sick leave (3:1) and any unsued vacation (1:l)

Practice B.

Formal PDO policy in place for five years. Sick leave and vacation days are accrued into one bank. Employees have an opportunity to sell back PDO time once a year.

Holidays are not accrued in the PDO policy.

It has been decided that the merged practice will have a formal PDO accrual policy with separate banks for vacation, sick leave and reserve sick leave bank.

Our dilema is how to equitably establish PDO amounts for the employees of the new practice and yet not place a financial and potential scheduling hardship on the newly merged practice

Practice A employees may not have any time to bring forward to the new practice. While some employees of Practice B may have a significant amount of accrued time.

The inital proposal is to set an across the board allocations to each bank for all employees with some allowance for tenure.

Practice B employees would be offered the opportunity to bring forward or sell back on a 1:1 basis any accrued vacation time. Practice B employees would lose any accrued sick leave. However, as I indicated earlier we would establish an initial allocation in the sick leave bank and reserve sick leave bank for all employees.

Has anyone experience a similar situation. Looking for other recommendations, pitfalls, reference sources. Help

Linda Wallace

odwlbw@bellsouth.net