Bookable and non-bookable appointments

GP practices routinely set aside appointment slots for admin activities, team meetings or breaks. Patients cannot book or be booked into these. A field in the data collection indicates whether a slot is bookable or non-bookable, but not whether a slot was embargoed – that is, delayed or deferred from being made available for booking.

This guidance improves the quality of information on whether an appointment is bookable or not by defining what each appointment slot will be used, as described below.

The only slot types to which the bookable or embargoed flag should ever be applied are those involving real-time patient interaction. These are currently:

• Face to Face (Surgery)
• Face to Face (Home Visit)
• Written (Including Online)
• Telephone/Audio
• Video with Audio

We know that some slot types start as embargoed or blocked, but then change status. It's the final status of the appointment that counts, so, for example, if a patient is seen in a blocked slot, then the slot type should be changed to the appropriate type.

In SystmOne, if the slot is left as ‘blocked’, the patient facing activity undertaken during this slot will not be collected in the GP Appointments Data Collection and it will not show whether the patient attended or DNA.

Using the descriptions of patient interaction above, check that all slots in your Appointment Ledger are correctly defined.

1. The slot types can be found from the main screen by selecting Setup > Appointments > Slot types.

2.  The screen will then display the slot types dialog box. The ‘Type’ column displays the relevant information.

Check that no slots that do not comply with the definition of bookable above, such as coffee breaks, are shown as bookable.

3. To change Slot Type, select the appropriate entry then click the amend slot type button.

4. Change the type as appropriate using the descriptions of patient interaction above.

5. Select a letter for the slot – this is important as every slot type must have a unique letter. It does not matter which letter is chosen, as it is used in the background of rota building.

6. Repeat this process for each of your slot types to ensure that they are all appropriately and accurately recorded. You may see a prompt saying that the changes may not take effect until you log out and log on again.

This is a good opportunity to do a bit of housekeeping – for example, deleting slot types you no longer need, checking bookable slots are ticked as bookable and non-bookable slots are ticked as blocked, and embargoed slots are marked as such.