This is a fictional Case Study for training purposes.
Abbey Road Health Care - Extended Access Service running over four hubs in London.
We have a large team of Doctors, Nurses and HCAs that have worked for our service for a number of years. All teams are made up of sessional and locum staff for the most part, given the nature of our Extended Access service.
Collecting Availability
We like to collect our staff's availability a month in advance. After we've got this, we allocate a few initial shifts to some of our preferred GPs if they're available and then run the RotaMaster Allocation Wizard to spread out the allocation of the rest of the sessions.
The first step in creating a new rota for the coming month is to create a calendar from one of our shift patterns (we learned about Shift Patterns from this article)
We do this from the Rota > Manage Calendar function. This quick guide helps us with this feature - Creating Calendars.
Once we have a new, blank rota created, we upload the new month's sessions to the Web Portal using the Rota Upload facility. This is found under Rota > Rota Upload. We just double click on the Rota Group that we want to open Availability for and set the 'Availability collection Date Ranges' to the new rota period.
Once this is done, we click on the little globe icon to upload the shifts to the Log Availability section of the staff Web Portal. Here's a guide for staff on Logging Availability.
We make use of a feature on the Admin Web Portal that allows us to stop staff being able to Log Availabilities after a certain deadline. You don't need to use this, but it can be useful if you usually ask staff to, for example, log their availability for February shifts by 15th January. Then, on 15th January, you can follow this guide to switch off the logging facility. It can always be switched back on at any stage.
Allocating Initial Sessions based on Availabilities
We have some staff that we like to have working on certain sessions - if they're available. After collecting availability we make sure that we allocate them to the sessions before running the Allocation Wizard. Some months we skip this step entirely.
To allocate sessions manually, based on availability, we go to the Rota > Manage Availabilities screen.
From here, we make sure that all of the Availabilities have downloaded by clicking the Import icon;
Then, we click on the Date tab and click through the days in the calendar for the coming rota period to see which GPs have logged for - for example - weekend sessions.
The 'Shifts' panel will show any shifts on that day, and the 'Count' column shows how many staff have logged for the shift. Down in the bottom 'Available Personnel' panel, we can see the names of the staff that have logged, along with their contact details and the date that they submitted their request.
We can choose to allocate someone to a shift by clicking their name and then clicking the allocate button (blue person on paper icon).
Once we've done this, we run the allocation wizard to evenly spread out the rest of the shifts, based on the availability that has been logged.
This guide talks through the Availability Allocation Wizard.
The wizard will not overwrite any sessions that have already been allocated.