How to plan practice duty in a doctors' practice

Step 1: create activities, not shifts

A shift plan says who is there from when to when. That is not enough in a practice, because the same person does three different things over the course of a morning. So start by creating the activities that exist at your practice: consultations, home visits, blood sampling, vaccination clinics, reception, billing.

Every activity gets a duration in the grid, usually 30 minutes. That turns the day plan into a surface where it is visible who is assigned to what at any moment, rather than only who is present.

Step 2: store the qualifications

Delegable services may only be taken on by people qualified to perform them. In the plan that means an activity gets a staffing rule tied to a qualification, not to a particular person.

The benefit shows when somebody drops out: if someone falls ill, the system looks for people with the same qualification, instead of the practice manager going through in their head who could step in.

• An activity can require several qualifications at once.
• People can hold several qualifications.
• Anyone without a qualification does not even appear as a suggestion for that activity.

Step 3: enter the on-call duty

On-call duty outside consultation hours is part of the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians' duty to ensure care, and the roster comes from there. Enter it as a shift of its own, not as ordinary working time.

The reason is the calculation afterwards: after a duty, eleven hours of rest apply under section 5 ArbZG. Anyone keeping the duty only in a list plans the next morning's consultation too early, and the mistake only surfaces when somebody works it out.

Step 4: check apprentices separately

For apprentices under 18, the tighter limits of the Youth Employment Protection Act apply: at most eight hours a day and 40 a week, longer breaks, a night rest. In a practice training medical assistants, that often concerns one or two people.

This check runs automatically in MetronHR as soon as the date of birth is stored. It is separate from the check under the Working Hours Act, because it is stricter.

Step 5: publish and let time recording run

The plan says what is intended. Time recording says what actually happened, and only that satisfies the record-keeping duty. The two run alongside each other: whoever comes in clocks in, and at the end of the month the variance between plan and actual appears in the evaluation.

Clocking happens where the work happens: at reception in the browser, in the treatment room via a terminal with a card, on a home visit in the app.