*Update 03.01.2023 additional information added (footnote 4) on sick leave away from the place of employment.**Update 18.12.2022: Having struggled to find the correct email addresses to send a sickness certificate or declare an accident, we have found using PMO Mobile 2.0 on a smart phone to be a bit more user friendly.* If you are sick during your annual leave it is possible to have those days credited to your sysper quota but the rules are different from those for being at work and the deadlines are tighter [1]
You require a certificate from the first day and must inform the medical service and send the certificate within 48 hours.
Continue reading Sickness during annual leave: act fast and recover the days!
*Update 11.10.2022 Covid booster II campaign is starting soon (again 
Although at the moment you are most probably in full trying-to-find-one-last-gift mode (good luck with that!), there are perhaps some other things worth checking before your well-deserved Christmas and New Year holiday leave.
Are you a Commission colleague posted in a EU Delegation to a third country and are you coming back to the EU for vacation? Or perhaps you already came to Europe for a short vacation and got stuck due to COVID-19 related travel bans and as a consequence you were put on forced annual leave? Do you feel discriminated when your treatment is compared to the same situation of Commission staff residing in the EU? 
*Update 19.12.2022 at the request of a colleague we have added a table, see below.* For many of us, the coronavirus crisis means we cannot visit our relatives back home, in particular older members of our families. Some of them suffer from isolation and anxiety and badly miss our support. Once the crisis calms down, we will need to catch up with them and make sure that they go back to a normal life as quickly as possible. Of course, we can use our regular leave days for that purpose. However, if your annual leave days are not sufficient, there is a little-known possibility offered by the 