Shifts

This is where your hospital’s staff rota lives: who is working, when, and what happens when someone needs cover. It sits inside Settings rather than its own page, next to Staff & Teams.

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What this tab controls

A staff member who cannot manage the rota sees a simple My shifts view instead: their own upcoming shifts, a Request swap or cover button on each, and the requests they are part of.

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Assign a shift

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Every new shift says where it is

A shift has up to four place fields, together under Where is this shift? on the New shift, New shift type and New coverage rule panels, and shown on View shift: All four are optional on a shift type and on a coverage rule. A new shift needs at least one of them; if you leave all four empty the panel says Choose where this shift is — a department, ward, unit, or type a place. and nothing is saved. A shift made before this change keeps the department it had and can still be edited without choosing a place. Choosing a shift type fills in all four places from the type (unless you have already chosen one); you can change any of them. A shift created from a repeating pattern, or by Copy week, carries the same places. A shift never reads Department not set while it has a ward, a unit or a typed place: the rota, My shifts, the shift types list and the coverage rules list show every place a shift names, for example Medicine · Emergency Ward · In-patient care. When you group the rota By department, ward or unit, a shift sits under its department if it has one, otherwise under its ward, otherwise under its unit, otherwise under the place you typed. If your hospital has more than one active location, a Location picker appears too; with one location it is hidden and every shift uses it. Because a shift points at the department or ward itself, renaming a department, a ward or a location never breaks a shift. The triage handover and the assign-staff lists read the rota by department and by the shift’s time, so someone on shift for Outpatient Department shows under that department whatever it is called later. The handover’s No rota for this department means no shift is set for that department at that time, and it links straight to the rota filtered to that department (Open the rota for this department). A ward’s handover on the Nursing Station reads the rota the same way by ward: a shift placed on that ward appears there, and so does a shift for the In-patient care unit, or for a ward department (one marked This is a ward / inpatient department), that names no ward, because it covers every ward, so a rota built by department or by ward shows the same people. Its No rota for this ward means no shift is placed there at that time, and Open the rota for this ward opens the rota filtered to it. A shift placed only on a ward never appears on a department’s rota. Emails and calendar invites say where. The email a person gets when a shift is assigned, changed or cancelled, the reminder before it starts, and the calendar invite that comes with them all name the shift’s place — its department, its ward (with the sub-ward), its unit and the place you typed, for example Medicine · Emergency Ward - Bay 2 · In-patient care. A shift that was never given any of these shows the department text it was created with. Times read in 12-hour. Start and end are chosen on the same time picker as the appointment form — hour, minute and AM / PM, with quick buttons for common times — so a shift reads 7:00 PM – 7:00 AM. If the end is at or before the start the panel says This shift ends the next day, and the rota shows (next day) beside the hours. Nursing shift times. When a shift is for one of your wards, for the In-patient care unit, or for a ward department (one an owner or manager marked This is a ward / inpatient department under Departments), the shift panel offers the times from Settings → Facility → Nursing shifts — for example Day 7:00 AM – 7:00 PM — as buttons that fill the start and end for you. You can still change them; a ward shift whose times do not line up with the nursing shifts is allowed and marked Outside the nursing pattern. Changing the nursing shift pattern never rewrites a shift: after you save it you are told how many upcoming ward shifts no longer line up, counting shifts for a ward and for the in-patient unit as well as ward departments.

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Shifts that still need a place

Shifts created before this change carried a typed department. Where the typed text was exactly one department’s name or code (ignoring capitals and extra spaces) it was linked for you; nothing is matched any more loosely than that. The rest stay on the rota marked Department not set — a shift that has a ward, a unit or a typed place is not counted here — and a banner at the top of the Rota tab counts them with a one-click fix: Choose the department gives every shift that shares the same typed text its department in one step (Assign a department does the same for upcoming shifts with none). Owners and managers only, and recorded in the audit log. Switching off a department or location that upcoming shifts use asks first and says how many upcoming shifts use it. Those shifts stay on the rota, marked Inactive department or Inactive location, so cover never silently disappears; Move those shifts in the banner reassigns them when you are ready. Shifts that have already happened are never changed.

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Ask for time off

Anyone with a staff profile can ask for leave from Time off in this tab (a staff member who cannot manage the rota sees it beside My shifts). You cannot have two open requests on the same days. A request that has already ended cannot be made.

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Approve or decline time off

Owners and managers always see two more tabs under Time off: To decide (waiting requests, soonest first, with a count) and Decided. Anyone else needs the Approve time off permission, ticked under Staff & Teams → a person’s Permissions; a person who has not been given it does not see them.

• Approve shows how many bookings are already in that time (appointments and classes, with the day and time, never a client’s name) before you confirm. They stay exactly as they are: nothing is moved or cancelled, so you move or cancel those yourself. You can add a reply for the person.
• Decline asks for an optional reply and tells the person.
• Withdraw approval (under Decided) declines an approved request that has not ended and removes that person’s Out of Office again.
• Nobody approves their own request, except the clinic owner.

An approved request puts an Out of office on that person’s calendar for those days, exactly as if they had added it themselves: online booking cannot book them and staff are asked to confirm before booking them. It shows on the Rota as a Time off marker on their row and in a Time off in this period line above the grid, with the dates only, never the type or the note.

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Build a repeating pattern

Instead of assigning the same shift week after week, create a shift type once, then a pattern that says which days it repeats on and how far into the future to generate it. The tab shows how many shifts a pattern will add before you confirm. Running it again later only adds what’s missing — it never duplicates a shift already on the rota. Copy week duplicates a whole week’s rota to another week in one step, for the whole team or one department.

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Upload a rota from a spreadsheet

If your rota already lives in a spreadsheet, Upload rota adds many shifts at once instead of entering them one by one.

1. Open Upload rota and choose Download template. It is a CSV with one row per shift: Staff email, Staff name, Department or ward, Date, Start time, End time, and optional Title and Notes. Times are your clinic’s local time, and an end time earlier than the start means the shift ends the next day.
2. Fill it in and choose your file. CSV and Excel (XLSX) files both work, up to 500 shifts at a time.
3. Check the preview. Every row is listed with what will happen to it. Nothing is saved until you choose Import.

How people and places are matched:

• A person is found by Staff email first. Only if the email is blank is the full name used, and it must match one active staff member exactly. A name shared by two people is not guessed; use the email.
• A department or ward is found by its name or its code, as set up in your departments. An inactive department is not used.
• Dates are read day first (02/11/2026) or as 2026-11-02.

Rows that cannot be used are listed with the reason and left out, never guessed: staff or department not found, a date or time that is not readable, a row repeated in the file, or a shift that overlaps another shift the same person already has. Fix them in your file and upload it again. Uploading the same file twice is safe: shifts that are already on the rota are recognised and not added again. If a person is marked Out of Office at that time, that row is reported as not saved so you can confirm it from the rota yourself. Each person gets one notice that shifts were added, not an email for every shift. You need to be an owner or manager, or have the Shifts permission, to upload a rota.

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Request and approve cover

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Coverage rules

Set a minimum headcount for a place and a role during a time window — for example, at least two people on Front Desk between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM on weekdays, or three nurses on the Emergency Ward overnight. A rule can name a department, a ward, a unit or a typed place; leave all four empty for any place. A rule that names more than one counts only the shifts that match all of them: a rule for the Emergency Ward and In-patient care counts shifts that name both. The Rota tab flags any window that falls below the minimum, and separately flags a person booked onto two overlapping shifts.

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On shift now

Wherever you choose a person to assign a patient to (the front desk Check in sheet, a triage nurse, the appointment form’s provider, a ward patient’s care team), the people whose shift covers that department and place right now are listed first under On shift now. Everyone else is listed below under Everyone else and can still be chosen. The Nursing Station also shows who is on shift now: with a ward chosen it lists the people whose shift is for that ward, together with anyone on a shift for the In-patient care unit or for a ward department (which cover every ward); with All wards it lists everyone on shift. If nobody has a matching shift, the list looks exactly as before.