The templating feature aims to save you time when assigning visits to Care Professionals, it does this by replicating your preferred scheduling rota every week at the click of a button. Sometimes the template does not apply in an expected way which can leave you with more unallocated visits than you expected.
There are a few ways to mitigate this and to ensure the template applies as accurately as possible.
How does the template work?
To help you fix any issues it is important to first understand how the template feature works. The template works by assigning the regular carers you have set to a visit schedule.
We recommend that you only select one or two regular carers within the visit schedule, to ensure that the same care professionals are assigned to the run each week, depending on their availability. If you assign too many regular carers this will prevent the template from applying properly.
It is crucial that you assign a regular carer otherwise the template will not assign a visit to anyone and it will remain unallocated.
For more information on how to assign a regular carer please see this article- How to assign regular caregivers to visits (if you use runs please see the section For agencies that predominantly use runs)
Why has the template not assigned a Care Professional?
There are only three reasons why the template will not assign a visit to a Care Professional:
The Care Professional has been declined
The Care Professional is not available for the visit
The Care Professional has not been set as a regular carer
How to fix this
The Care Professional has been declined- You have set them as a regular carer but you may have declined them which means the template will never assign them- make sure they are allowed to visit the Care Recipient.
The Care Professional is not available- Check you have added their availability schedule, they may be sick, on holiday or they may already be assigned to a visit. This is why we suggest having 2 regular carers, the template will apply the other Care Professional in situations where one of them is not available.
The Care Professional has not been set as a regular Carer- See the above article on how to do this- Birdie will never assign a carer that is not part of the same Group. If a run contains a Care Recipient in a Group that is different from the group of the regular carer, we will not assign this run and it will remain unallocated.
For agencies that predominantly use runs
If you mainly use Runs in your agency, there is a specific way to template these which will ensure that the whole run will be allocated to one Care Professional and not left in the unallocated section.
Read this article on how to template specifically for runs- How to template Runs using the Regular carer feature
The main points to remember are:
You only need to assign 1 or 2 regular carers to the first visit in the run, do not assign a regular carer for each visit in the run
The Care Professional needs to be in the same Groups as all of the Care recipients in the run
birdie will never split a run between Care Professionals, if it does not assign it will be left in the unallocated section
birdie will apply overlapping visits if they are in a run
How to test if your template is working optimally
The template should apply approximately 90% of your visits, you can test this by applying the template for the week to get a general understanding of how well it is applying. We suggest that you do not push changes, this is just to see where the outliers are.
It is normal to have a few visits in the unallocated section, these may be last-minute visits or they may have become unallocated because the Care Professional is not available.
Scroll through the week, if you see repeated visits that are not being picked up by the template go to the How to fix this section of this article and work through the points. Once you have gone through and checked regular carers and availability, apply the template again, this should apply more visits.
Please get in touch if interested in more information on this feature!