The Calendar section in Practice Admin allows you to publish your available times for online appointments in a familiar, calendar-style interface.
To jump to a specific section within the article, please use the links below.
- How to access Calendar
- How to change your advance publishing preferences
- How to create schedules
- How to edit and delete schedules
- Factoring in set breaks and public holidays
- How to delete your availability quickly (ad-hoc basis)
How to access Calendar
To access Calendar, navigate to the 'Settings' section of your Practice Admin account and click on the 'Manage Availability' tab.
Once you are on the Calendar page, you can see it will default to the current day's view.
You can navigate to a different day by using the < or > arrow icons or select the calendar icon to the left of the arrows to select a specific date.
You can also zoom in and out of your daily view by clicking the + or - icons on the left.
How to change your advance publishing preferences
To change your advance publishing preferences, click on the gear icon at the top right-hand corner (next to the 'Create Schedule' button).
This will open a pop-up box that enables you to click a drop-down list of options for how far in advance you wish to display your available appointments online.
Important: Please consider your vaccine type here, and how far in advance you would need to publish in order for patients to also book in their second dose in the same booking form.
How to create schedules
To publish your available appointments online, click on the 'Create Schedule' button.
This will bring up a form as pictured below:
If you have more then one consultation room, ensure you choose the correct one by clicking on the drop-down section under 'Schedule for'. Otherwise, this will default to your only available consultation room.
Ensure you have the correct start date for the schedule. If you need to change this, click on the calendar icon to select the correct date.
The next step is to decide whether you wish to publish a single appointment or a block of appointments.
If you select 'Single appointment', you just need to choose the start time and length, to create your single appointment.
However, the most common way to create schedules is to add a 'Block of appointments', where you will now be able to select an end time.
Please make sure you factor in your regular breaks! See how to do this here - Factoring in set breaks and public holidays
TIP - When selecting a start and end time, you can free text the time you want (5:00) instead of scrolling all the way down to find 5:00 pm.
You can also make use of the repeat settings for the schedule by selecting weekly, fortnightly or every workday. You also have the option to set a stop date for each repeat option.
Please note the default is always set to 'Doesn't repeat' and 'Never stop repeating' for weekly, fortnightly and every workday repeat options.
Once you have created your schedule, allow a few minutes before you can see the available appointments in the Calendar (especially if you have created them quite far in advance).
If you have repeat schedules, you will see these published in your Calendar up until the specified end date (or on all future dates if an end date was not specified).
However, only the appointments that are within your advance publishing preferences (e.g. the next 28 days) will appear online for patients to book.
How to edit and delete schedules
Once you have created some schedules, you may wish to go back and modify them. To do this, simply navigate to the schedule you wish to modify, click on the schedule to reveal the same pop up you saw when you originally created the schedule.
From there, you can amend any setting you wish. And if it is a repeat schedule, this will also update all future schedules already published.
To delete the schedules, simply select the trash icon.
Factoring in set breaks and public holidays
When you are creating your schedules, it's important to factor in your regular breaks by creating multiple schedules.
Example: My schedule runs from 9:00 am - 5:00 pm with a 1-hour lunch break at 12:00 pm. I will need to create two block of appointments as shown below:
How to delete your availability quickly (ad-hoc basis)
This functionality is great when you need to make quick amendments to your live appointments on particular days without affecting your regular repeating schedules. This is ideal for situations when a staff member needs to finish early for the day or for any ad-hoc breaks.
To do this, simply click on the schedule you wish to update. You will see a pop-up default to the 'Manage availability' tab with the individual slots for you to delete.
Example: I want to finish early and remove all slots from 5:30 pm. I simply click on the X to remove all slots. You can see the slots will automatically grey out in the schedule.
To republish individual slots again, simply click on the refresh icon as shown below:
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