Articles on: Diary and Scheduling

How do I block out time in my diary?

Whilst you may work regular hours/days, occasionally you may wish to block out time for holidays, conferences, supervision etc.

The best way to do this is as follows:

Go to Settings -> Scheduling and go to the Appointment Types section

Click Create New Appointment Type and create an appointment type called something like Unavailable with the following attributes:



You should set the default duration to correspond with your working hours. So for example, if you work 9-5pm, that is 8 hours or 480 minutes. The reason you should do this is you want to make sure that each full day you are "not available" is blocked. If you want to book a shorter period of time just adjust the duration when you block out the time in your diary.

Having set up the appointment type all you need to do now is block out the time in your diary.

If you want to block out a day just go to that day in the diary click at the start of the day to bring up the appointment model.

Select Non-patient, add a label (for example Holiday), select the Unavailable appointment type and check the times From and To and the date:



To block out more than one day, set the Recurrence to Daily and specify the end date in the Repeat Until field:



Make sure that the status you use when blocking out time in your diary contains the setting Does it mean the Patient is attending? as Yes. This tells WriteUpp that the slot is unavailable.

Then click Save and you should be good to go.

Doing this will mean the following:

This time will be blocked out for availability searches
You will have a record of Unavailable time that you can access by going to to Menu -> Business Views and unticking the Only show Patient related appointments box to include non-patient appointments in the list

If you have time blocked out in your diary and you find that patients are able to book into these slots, please check the status you have used against the slots. Check the set-up of the status by going to Main Menu -> Settings -> Scheduling -> Appointment Statuses and make sure this Does it mean the Patient is attending? setting is set to Yes:

Updated on: 27/10/2022

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