PERCOM’s policy for scheduling approved students is 30 days minimum in advance for your date requests. The reason for this is because it can take that long to get responses and approvals or denials from many of the sites. However, due to the pandemic, our Clinical Faculty has been working as closely as they can with students and sites with less notice because of the continuing changes, and even cancellations of shifts and even entire school schedules without warning, due to COVID 19 and individual site issues.
HOWEVER, sending in requests that are less than 2 weeks to over 30 days out during this period and expecting Clinical Faculty to jump through hoops to schedule you is not appropriate. It simply cannot be done, even during this period. And if your request is less than 30 days in advance, the odds of us being able to get it set up for you are slim.
We REQUIRE a MINIMUM of 2 weeks up to at least 30 days notice for rotation date requests during this period and until we are out from under the uncertainly of the pandemic officially. Once the pandemic is declared over for schools and hospitals, we will go back to our prior policy. This is absolutely necessary to allow time for our Clinical Faculty to go through the request procedures , which vary from site to site (email, scheduling systems, sending your clinical paperwork to the sites, phone calls, etc.) and to have time to follow up when needed when they do not respond, which is rather frequently. Site responses can vary due to many things outside of PERCOM’s control – changes in staff at the site, scheduling staff at the sites only available one or two days a week if that often, scheduling staff vacations or changes without notification to the schools, etc. Please remember, that just because a school has a rotation affiliation agreement with a site does not mean that we can just send students whenever we want. Each site has their own processes, requirements, paperwork submissions, and approvals or denial procedure. And each site can have changes that are not sent out to the schools that can cause delays in scheduling as well. So we HAVE to have advanced notice and enough time to try our best to make things happen for you. Therefore, rotation requests less than these mentioned in this post will not be accepted.
Thank you for your patience and please work positively with us to get things scheduled. Our Faculty really do go above and beyond for you when you try and abide by the rules and policies and treat them with respect, diplomacy and professionalism.