Creating an Appointment Diary

Purpose

The purpose of appointment diaries is to manage the delivery of a clinical service by a practitioner in a single room for a period of time. Appointments within a diary can either be timed, untimed or a mix of both. This user guide will show you how to create a new appointment diary in Medicus.

Creating an appointment diary

There are two ways to create a new appointment diary in Medicus:

1. From the Appointment Book, select the Actions button to open up a dropdown menu and then select Appointment Diary
2. From the Staff Schedule, click on the calendar where you would like to appointment diary to be scheduled. You'll be presented with a list of activities, where you can select Appointment diary.

This will open up the New Appointment Diary form. If you chose option two of clicking on a day in the staff schedule calendar, this will be pre-populated in the form.

Basic Details

You'll be required to populate the following fields in order to proceed:

1. The appointment service the diary is for e.g. GP consultations, blood pressure clinic etc.
2. The date, start and end time of the appointment diary.
3. Whether the appointments are either timed, untimed or a mix.

If you'd like to create the appointment diary on multiple days over the next week, you can select this from the Also create this diary on dropdown.

Timed and Untimed Appointments

An appointment diary can contain timed, untimed or a mix of both appointments. Selecting either timed or untimed appointments will open up additional fields on the form for you to complete.

Note: An untimed appointment is an appointment that does not have a specified start or end time, only a duration. An untimed portion of an appointment diary may be useful for telephone triage consultations.

When creating a timed appointments diary, you'll be presented with the following fields to complete:

1. The site that the appointments will take place at.
2. The room that the appointments will take place in (optional).
3. Default delivery mode e.g. face-to-face, telephone, home visit or video.
4. The appointment duration.
5. Default NHS slot category (required for GPAD reporting).

As you complete the form, you'll see the right hand side of the screen populate with the details you've entered.

When creating an untimed appointments diary, you'll be presented with the following fields to complete:

1. The site that the appointments will take place at.
2. The room that the appointments will take place in (optional).
3. Default delivery mode e.g. face-to-face, telephone, home visit or video.
4. The appointment duration.
5. Default NHS slot category (required for GPAD reporting).
6. Specify when internal booking opens.
7. Whether patients can book online, and if this is checked, when the online booking opens.

You'll notice the right hand side of the screen doesn't populate with the appointment slots in the same way as it does for timed appointments. This is because untimed appointments don't have a start and end time, so are not presented as timed slots.

For untimed appointments, patients will receive a reminder for the start and end time of the appointment diary.

Appointment Booking Rules

In Medicus, you can override properties of the diary for a specific amount of time. These are called appointment booking rules.

Examples of some useful appointment booking rules:

1. Default delivery mode override - this will allow you to change the delivery mode of appointments for a period of time. For example, if you'd like to run a set of telephone appointments in the first part of the diary, followed by in-person appointments for the rest of the time.
2. Usual appointment duration override - this will allow you to schedule some shorter or longer appointments for a period of time, compared to the usual duration.
3. NHS National Slot Type category override - this will allow you to override the NHS slot category override for a period of time.

You can override more than one field within the same appointment booking rule, for example, you could edit both the default delivery mode and the NHS National Slot Type category for those appointments within the same timeframe. 

Here you can see the right hand side of the screen shows the breakdown of appointments in the diary with a default delivery mode override applied to timed appointments.

YNote: It's possible to add more than one appointment booking rule to an appointment diary, however, they must not overlap in start or end time.

Staff Requirements

Each appointment diary may have different staff requirements.

At the point of creating the new appointment diary, you must specify the number of required staff. 

However, it's optional to assign which staff member(s) these are at this point. For example, you may have a service that's run every week but only assign staff members to the diary once the rota is published.

If you choose to leave this blank and assign the staff member later, this will appear in the staff schedule as an unfulfilled requirement.

The number 1 in the bottom right of the blue box indicates how many staff member are required to be assigned.

When you're ready to assign a staff member, click on the blue box to edit the appointment diary and assign the relevant staff member.

Note: If you assign a staff member to the appointment diary when they are already assigned to other duties, you'll be notified of this via a warning message.

If there are appointment diaries with unfulfilled staff requirements for the following day, then Medicus will create a task for the default assignee to assign staff members in time for the duties.

Copy Forward

The final part of the New Appointment Diary form is the copy forward checkbox.

This allows you to copy diaries forward for a maximum of 52 weeks.

Completing the Appointment Diary

Once you're happy with your completed form, select Continue to review to be taken to a summary of the diaries that will be scheduled.

Check you're happy before confirming the appointment diaries. The appointment diaries will then be created in Medicus, ready to book patients into.

Bulk creating appointment diaries

From the staff schedule, select the Bulk add diaries button.

This will open up the Bulk Add Appointment Diaries form. The Basic Details and Copy Forward sections of the form are the same as when creating a new standard appointment diary.

However, the staff and room requirements look slightly differently.

As you'll be creating diaries in bulk, you'll need to specify how many diaries you'd like to create, and how many staff members are required to be assigned per diary.

Once specified, you can assign the staff member, site and room for each diary.

Similarly to the standard appointment diary form, the only required field is the site. Room allocation is optional. The staff member can be left blank and assigned at a later date.

Once you've completed the form you will need to review and check each diary before Medicus creates the diaries.

Note: If you assign a staff member to the appointment diary when they are already assigned to other duties, you'll be notified of this via a warning message.

When you get to the last diary, you'll see the Confirm and create X diaries button.

Once you're happy with the appointment diaries and you've confirmed, they will be created in Medicus, ready to book patients into.