Department & care
Absences, freed-up rooms and stand-ins
When someone is absent, the room they were booked into becomes free: spot it automatically, suggest an available stand-in, and link absences to emails in both directions.
The problem
An absence reported by email has to be entered in the schedule, then on every activity it affects. The echocardiography room or clinic slot the absent person held stays empty, or is discovered empty on the morning itself.
Step-by-step method
- Absences → email: a button generates the monthly email of recorded absences (one line per staff member, dates, number of days), ready to copy. It asks recipients to reply with one line per person in the format
NAME: dates. - Email → absences: an “import from an email” button reads replies in that format, writes the absences, carries them over to the activity tabs, and cleanly rejects lines whose name is unknown.
- Detecting freed-up rooms: every half-day held by an absent person is flagged “room free?” in the relevant tab, with a summary banner at the top of the week.
- Stand-ins (“jokers”) by half-day: a people × half-days table shows who can cover when (for example a clinical fellow on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, a junior doctor on certain afternoons). It is shared with the team.
- Suggest, don’t impose: in the freed slot, only the stand-ins available that day (neither absent nor already assigned) appear. One click assigns them for this week only; the template schedule is never touched; the assignment can be removed with one click.
- Newcomers: a stand-in who is not yet in the staff list is added after confirmation, never guessed.
Deliverable
Absences entered once and visible everywhere; freed-up rooms flagged and replacements suggested.
Safeguards
The AI drafts the emails; it does not send them. Absences remain internal information for the department.
Starter prompt
Add to the schedule an import of absences from an email in the format “NAME: dates” and a button that generates the monthly absence email. Then flag the rooms freed up by an absence and suggest the stand-ins available for that half-day. Test with three fictitious absences.