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/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 for, 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 EMIS the ‘Bookable Slot’ box defaults to ‘On’, which can lead to over-reporting of unused bookable appointments.

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

1. The slot types can be found from the main screen:

• Appointment Book
• Appts Config
• under ‘Organisation Options’ section
• Slot Types

2. This will display the slot types dialog box. Clicking on a slot type and then clicking the ‘Edit’ function will open the ‘Slot Type Details’ box.

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

Tick the bookable slot box to make a slot bookable and untick it to make a slot non-bookable.

3. Repeat this process for each of your slot types to ensure that they are all appropriately and accurately recorded.

This is a good opportunity to do a bit of housekeeping – for example, archiving or 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.

As part of this review you may decide to archive a slot type. If you archive a slot you can later unarchive it to use again. To do this:

1. Access the slot types from the main screen (see image above).

• Appointment Book
• Appts Config
• under ‘Organisation Options’ section
• Slot Types

2. Select the required slot type, then click 'Archive'.

3. A prompt box will appear asking you to confirm your action. Click 'Yes' to confirm or 'No' to cancel.

Slot types that have been successfully archived will have a Yes in the Archived column on the right. You can choose to show or hide any archived slot types in the Slot Types list.

To view archived slot types click 'Show Archived' on the menu. Alternatively, to hide archived items, click 'Hide Archived'.

Follow the same steps to unarchive a slot type.