Health care workers often feel obligated to work while sick, due to guilt about requiring colleagues to cover their absence.¹ This can be unhealthy for their patients and colleagues, and is one of the many factors that contributes to the national problem of clinician burnout. Attempts to mitigate burnout with family-friendly policies and scheduling flexibility typically focus on clinic start and end times, telehealth sessions that allow for remote work, and adjusting the length of appointments.² These policies, while useful, don't address clinicians calling out sick or other unexpected absences. Common strategies for those situations include opening a scheduling template at a later date to reschedule appointments or having other clinicians use their administrative time to cover, both of which can also contribute to burnout.

The COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the need for better systems to manage the impact clinician absences have on colleagues and patients, but there is still not much described in the literature about best practices for this. In this article, we describe an approach we implemented at a large, urban, academic primary care practice that improved clinician wellness, enhanced patient access, decreased bumped appointments, and maintained patient satisfaction in the event of a clinician call out. It's a flex clinician model that we believe could also be modified to fit smaller practices.