Purpose
Scheduling templates speed up the process of assigning duties to the staff schedule, and allows you to build templates containing diary assignments, breaks and rota activities. Before a template can be applied to a staff member in the staff schedule, you'll need to build a new schedule template. This user guide will show you how to create a new schedule template in Medicus.
Navigating to the scheduling module
To navigate to the scheduling module, select 'Scheduling & Appointments' from the modules menu on the left-hand side navigation bar.
Building a New Schedule Template
Once in the scheduling & appointments module, select 'Templates' from the left-hand side navigation bar and then the 'Schedule Templates' tab.
To create a new template, select the 'Add template' button.
This will open up a 'New Schedule Template' form.
Give your template a name, start time and end time, and select 'Create template'. This will then create a new template for you to start adding activities to.
The activities you can add to templates are:
- Appointment diary
- Break
- Other activity
Note: Meetings cannot be added to templates. This is because templates can only be applied to one staff member at a time, whereas meetings will typically have multiple attendees.
Adding a Diary to the Template
To add an appointment diary to the new template, select the 'Add' button to open up a dropdown list, and then select 'Appointment diary'.
This will open up the 'Add Diary to Template' form.
You can then choose the Appointment service, Appointment Type, whether it is a timed appointment or untimed appointment, the Site location and the Room allocation.
You can also set the start and end time of the diary. If this is the first item added to the template, the start time will default to the start time of the template. Otherwise, the start time will default to the end of the item with the latest end time in the template.
This is a similar form to the new appointment diary form, but without the need to specify the dates and staff members, as you'll do this when applying the template.
Once you've completed the form, either cancel/save, or you can also add other options:
Other template options:
Appointment Booking Rules: Add in another appointment type into the template.
Breaks: Schedule in time for the clinician to take a break.
Other activities: Eg. Tutorial or Admin Time.
Completing the Template
Once you've filled your template with activities from the template start time to end time, your template is complete and ready to be applied to the staff schedule.
Creating a Week Template
Once you have created daily clinic templates as needed, you can add these to a week template. Under Templates, select Week Templates and then Add template and give it a name.
For each day that you want to populate, click Add schedule template and select the schedule template(s) you want to add for that day. You can add more than one template to the day (eg. for an AM and PM clinic template) as long as they don't overlap in times.
From here you can preview the template to see the timings for the week. You can also duplicate the template, if for example, you use a similar weekly pattern for another member of staff with only some changes.