Release 17 and new shift patterns

Release 17 was activated today. A massive release of new and exciting features and improvements.

Shift patterns

The major feature in this release is flexible shift patterns. This is in addition to standard staffing templates we have had forever and the term templates that were released in July that allows one-click cycling of trainees each term.

Whereas term templates were for trainees anchored to the normal (typically 4-week) cycle of a hospital, shift patterns can be of any length (5 days, 7 weeks) and can be applied in various ways:

• completely floating: add the standard night shift pattern (e.g. 4 nights followed by 2 off days followed by 3 afternoon shifts) starting on any day of the week.

• anchored to a day of the week (e.g. the pattern always starts on a Monday).

Other changes in this release

Other changes that you will now notice include:

• New leave approval rules to consider:

  • the length of the leave, e.g. auto-approve leave less than 3 days long

  • the number of people on leave, e.g. decline leave where there are any days where there are more than 5 registrars already on leave.

• More powerful multi-select function to change many shifts at the same time:

  • add tags

  • cancel shifts

  • change location

• A rethink of the way role filters are used on the roster pages. Previously filtering by ‘Consultant’ would show all shifts, including all the people on the shift, where a Consultant is currently or is eligible to be staffed. The new filter will only show the Consultants. Clicking into the shift to edit it will then show everyone to provide context to allow user to make changes.

• Improved functionality in staff-based views (where staff are listed down the side of the page for instance), including improved consistency between the staff views and other views regarding treatment of ‘available’, ‘conflict’ and ‘unallocated staff’.

• Improved PDF exports for rosters to show role icons, tags and conflicts, and improve presentation for various common formats.

• Improved and more detailed shift history logs.

• Improved presentation of day views with user photographs.

• Use term dates to quickly assign users to teams, rather than manually enter start and end dates.

• Improved management of public holidays

• The results of leave rules presented to leave approvers at the time of manual approval.

• A new ‘clean-up’ section of the admin dashboard to show administrators areas of attention, e.g. where there are shift or leave alerts being sent to people who are no longer active on HosPortal.

• Ability to see a table of leave on all roster pages.

• Various minor bug and cosmetic fixes and performance enhancements.

Remember that you many need to refresh your browser for all these changes to be visible.

Prior releases

See all our prior release notes here.