Even better for trainees and rotating staff: ‘term templates’

HosPortal is pleased to announce a significant enhancement to make it much easier to manage rosters where there there is regular turnover in roles or personnel. Although our brand new term templates. can be used for any sort of rostering like this, we know it will be extremely valuable for trainees in training hospitals.

HosPortal’s pattern-based rostering and templates are extremely powerful and have been used for years to manage reasonably stable roster patterns. We have been aware that many hospital do not apply templates to their trainees (and use our other efficient staffing methods) because the process of changing from one training cohort to another has been a little bit….clunky, as we say in the software business. But not any more.

HosPortal’s term templates now allow you do to three things that are integrated into your normal staffing templates and cycles:

1. Define terms, being the pattern of activities that each type of trainee does over your regular cycle. So you could define patterns of activity for the Cardiology term, the Neurology term and the Paediatric term. These patterns can include clinical allocations and on-call shifts.

2. Define term dates, being the period for which the terms are active. These might be ‘Registrar Term 1 2022’, or ‘JMO Spring Term 2023’, and can be for any arbitrary period.

3. Apply the trainees to each term for each set of term dates. So with a few clicks you can:

   • Apply Dr Adams to the Neurology term in Term 1, the Cardiology term in Term 2 and the Gastroenterology term in Term 3;

   • Swap Dr Brown from the Paediatric term to the General Surgery term from 12 July; and

   • Get Dr Davidson to replace Dr Edwards when Dr Edwards is on leave for 3 weeks during the middle of the training term.

Please get in touch for a demonstration if you want to know more.

And if that was not exciting enough, know that there is even more coming soon. We have underway what we call pattern-based rostering. This will solve the problem that some hospitals have where they staff in blocks or patterns. So it might be that if a doctor is due to do night shifts, the patterns is that they should be staffed to do two night shifts in a row, then an afternoon shift, then have two days off. We look forward to talking more about this later in the year.

Trainees applied to term templates, showing that Dr Burns cycles through three training terms. Dr Cole is yet to be allocated to a term.