How to plan the therapy day in physiotherapy

Step 1: create the cycle as an activity

Treatments run on a cycle, usually 20 minutes, and more for manual therapy or lymphatic drainage. Create the treatment types as separate activities with their own durations instead of laying a uniform cycle over the day.

That makes it visible in the plan how many treatments are actually possible in a day, not just who is present.

Step 2: allocate appointments by urgency, not by order of arrival

Every prescription brings its own deadline, and that determines the order in which appointments are allocated. A prescription from discharge management takes priority over a regular one, even if both arrive on the same day. The three deadlines are set out with their source on the industry page.

So set the urgency when creating the appointment, not just the preferred date. Anyone allocating by order of arrival regularly pushes back precisely the prescription with the shortest deadline.

• Set the urgency when creating it, do not add it later.
• Schedule prescriptions from discharge management first.
• Place the appointment so that a missed session can still be made up within the deadline.

Step 3: plan home visits with their travel time

An afternoon with three home visits looks short in the plan and in fact often takes longer than a day at the practice. The reason is the journeys in between, which appear nowhere in the appointment book.

So plan them as part of the activity, with a realistic duration per journey. And have people clock in in the app on the road instead of entering the times from memory in the evening: what gets reconstructed in the evening is regularly too little.

Step 4: keep working time and therapy time separate

The plan counts cycles, the time account counts minutes. The two belong side by side and not inside each other: anyone booking the cycles as working time ends the month with fewer hours in the system than were actually worked.

That is why time recording in MetronHR runs independently of the plan. At the end of the month both are there, and the difference between the planned cycle and the actual time is the figure that shows whether the cycle is set realistically.

Step 5: handle cancellations and replacements

If somebody cancels, a gap opens in the cycle that wants filling at short notice. In the plan the free slot becomes visible instead of disappearing into an appointment book.

If a therapist drops out, the open treatment goes out as a request to the people allowed to take it on, rather than to management.