Doctors and time off

Administrators only. Everything the bot offers comes from this screen.

Adding a doctor

A name and, optionally, their own specialty if the clinic has several. A newly created doctor has no schedule, and without a schedule they appear in no slot search at all.

The weekly schedule

For each day of the week, the bands they work. The bot generates available slots from this and removes the ones already taken.

Practical rules:

• Enter lunch as a break, not as part of the day. Two bands, 09:00–13:00 and 15:00–18:00, not one 09:00–18:00.
• A day with no bands is a day they don't work. No other marking needed.
• Changes take effect immediately and only affect future slots. Shortening a schedule does not cancel appointments already inside the part you cut.

Time off

Time off is an absence with a start and end date: holidays, a conference, leave. It's entered on the same screen as the schedule.

For the duration of the range the bot offers none of that doctor's slots. The weekly schedule stays untouched: when the range ends, availability returns by itself.

Both dates are inclusive: the 10th to the 12th is three days off, not two.

Appointments that fall inside the range

Here's the part that matters. A time-off range does not cancel or move appointments already booked, and does not notify patients.

When you save a range covering existing appointments, the dashboard tells you: it lists the affected appointments with patient, date and time. That's the cue for someone at the clinic to call or message those patients and move them.

This behaviour is deliberate. Auto-cancelling would destroy bookings as a side effect of editing availability, and messaging a patient on WhatsApp outside the 24-hour window needs a Meta-approved template that doesn't exist yet. We'd rather tell you exactly who to call than do something irreversible on your behalf.

Choosing what happens on a clash

In Configuration you can pick between two behaviours:

• Report (default) — saves the range and shows you the affected appointments.
• Block — refuses to save while appointments fall inside the range, until you explicitly confirm you want to anyway.

Block is safer for high-volume clinics, where saving a range without reading the list would be easy to do.

Deactivating a doctor

A deactivated doctor stops appearing in slot searches, but their past appointments stay in the history and in analytics. That's the right move when someone leaves the clinic: don't delete the record, deactivate it.