Rota Management Concepts with User and Organisational Templates
This guide explains the concepts behind User Template and Organisational Template Based Rota Management. For detailed instructions on how to implement these approaches, please refer to our other guides once you’ve understood the concepts.
User Templates
User Templates are linked to individual staff members and outline the type of work they typically perform during a specific week of the year. Initially, these templates might focus solely on session types (e.g., the kind of session they usually conduct), but they can also include appointment-based details, specifying both the type and number of appointments in the sessions that they usually do.
User Templates represent potential capacity and are used to form the basis of your rotas. They also help you assess your capacity and begin designing changes to your services to better meet demand, use capacity more efficiently, and understand the costs of running your current services.
Organisational Templates
Organisational Templates represent the design of the services you intend to provide with the capacity you have. In its simplest form, this might involve arranging one duty GP session at each of your sites for both morning and afternoon, or a single GP triage session for your entire organisation. However, Organisational Templates also allow for more nuanced designs to better meet service demands such as determining the minimum number of different appointment types (e.g., same-day bookings vs. book-in-advance) that you want to offer. These templates ensure that decisions about leave or recruitment align with your service targets.
Flexible vs. Protected Sessions
This is an important distinction that helps you manage capacity while meeting your practice’s needs. By labelling sessions as either Flexible or Protected, you can manage who does what, and when, in a way that suits the practice while keeping things fair for your team.
- Flexible Sessions: These are sessions that can be converted or changed to meet organisational requirements. For example, a GP Standard Session might be converted into a GP Duty Session if it’s that GP’s turn to cover. This conversion can happen automatically if you’re using Organisation Template-based rota management or can serve as a guide in User-Template-based rota management. Examples of Flexible Sessions:
- GP Standard Session
- Nurse Standard Session
- Protected Sessions: These are sessions that are not typically converted or changed, except in exceptional circumstances. For example, if a GP is scheduled for a Diabetes Clinic, this session would usually be protected, meaning another GP won’t be asked to take it over unless absolutely necessary.
Examples of Protected Sessions:- GP Management Session
- GP Minor Ops Session
- GP Diabetes Session
- GP Tutorial Session
How to Decide: Flexible or Protected?
An easy rule of thumb to help decide whether a session should be flexible or protected is this:
- If a staff member is absent, would someone else cover their session or would it be cancelled?
- If someone else would cover: Flexible
- If it wouldn’t go ahead without them: Protected
This decision will be vital when you start using Organisational Templates for rota management, as these rely on flexible sessions to help meet the practice’s service requirements.
Bringing User Templates and Organisational Templates Together
Managing your rotas with Organisational Templates allows your rota team to prioritise the level of service you want to provide when managing rotas and making decisions about leave. They begin by focusing on the service level target defined in the Organisational Template, then consider the available capacity in the User Templates. This approach ensures that the Organisational Template is covered before managing any additional capacity.
Tempo enables you to create different rota designs for different times of the year, such as a distinct service design for Christmas week or a bank holiday compared to a normal week.
