Summer School 2024 Week One – Practitioner Availability in the Calendar

It’s that time of year again! We’re excited to be bringing you the 2024 Summer School series 🎉  

We’ll share some of our newest updates, as well as tips and best practice for using Dentally efficiently to achieve your practice goals. 

We’re kicking off with an essential part of everyday practice management – your appointment calendar. A key part of keeping your calendar full is ensuring that it is accurate and reflects when your practitioners are actually available. This will allow everyone in your team to have visibility, and enable you to report more effectively on practitioner activity. 

Better yet, it will help guarantee a smooth and effortless booking experience for both your team and your patients. With less risk of appointments being booked in accidentally when a practitioner is unavailable, there will be no need to contact patients to reschedule! 

Dentally offers a range of features to show your practitioners’ availability – let's explore these in more detail 👇  

Practice Opening Hours 

First up, a simple but essential step – updating your practice opening hours. This is the default availability the calendar will show for all practitioners, so it’s important to ensure it is accurate. With practice opening hours set, your practitioners will be shown as unavailable outside of your chosen hours – so appointments won’t get booked in accidentally. 

Don’t worry – it's easy to amend these at any time, as well as making one-off changes to individual days (which we’ll come onto later).  

Schedules 

Need to show when someone’s availability doesn’t match the standard working hours? That's where schedules come in. 

Using schedules, you can easily set a practitioner’s start and end times, as well as breaks, for each day of the week. Do they finish early on Fridays? Take a longer lunch or pick their kids up from school on certain days? With schedules, it’s easy! Plus, you can edit a schedule at any time if availability changes, and even layer multiple schedules to run at the same time. 

You can also use schedules to show annual leave! Simply create a new schedule showing them as unavailable and set an end date – it’ll seamlessly revert to their normal working pattern once they return.  

Calendar Override 

What if you want to make one-off or last-minute changes to availability? The calendar override tool gives you this flexibility. 

In the calendar, simply click the relevant practitioner’s name at the top to quickly and effortlessly make the necessary adjustments. This will immediately show in the calendar, and supersedes any schedules or opening hours – allowing you to update a single day without impacting normal working patterns. 

It's the perfect way to seamlessly show last-minute absences such as sick leave, as well as ad hoc changes.

💡 Top tip: Make sure you’re using both schedules and the override feature to reflect practitioner breaks too!

Why is it important to show availability accurately? 

Keeping your calendar up-to-date gives you full transparency, ensuring everyone in your team is in the loop. It will also reduce the chance of appointments being booked incorrectly and needing to be rescheduled – meaning less burden on your team and a better patient experience. 

Most importantly, it’s vital as a dental practice that you monitor how efficiently you’re filling your calendar. Ensuring your white space is accurately reflected in the calendar will make your reporting more effective, enabling you to identify the right steps to achieve your goals. 

In Week 2 of Dentally Summer School, we’ll explore understanding your white space, filling your calendar and tracking your practitioner utilisation – so keep your eyes peeled for next week’s instalment! 

Got a question? Get in touch with Ellie Bot or our dedicated support team via Live Chat 📣