Availability is a list of dates with hours against them.
People on the books send their availability as dates. Not as a weekday they usually like, not as a rough number of shifts a month, but as the actual dates they will take and the hours they will work on each of them.
The office holds that list and reads it against the requests that come in. Where a date on the list is offered to a practice, it is marked as offered, so the same date is not put in front of two practices at once and then taken away from one of them.
Availability goes stale, so the office asks for it a fortnight at a time rather than a quarter at a time. A list that is four weeks old is a list of dates somebody has probably filled elsewhere, and offering from it wastes the practice’s morning as well as ours.
Where somebody withdraws a date they have offered but not yet had confirmed, the office says so at once and the square goes back to open. That is a normal thing to happen before a confirmation and an expensive thing to happen after one.
One is about reception. The other is about the person who turned a date down elsewhere.
Every booking carries two figures that look similar and are not. The confirmation lead is the number of days before the shift by which the practice wants the booking settled, so that reception can work to a name. The cancellation window is the period before the shift inside which a confirmed date is treated as held on both sides.
They are set at different lengths for good reasons. A practice may be content to confirm five days out and still want a fortnight of protection against a late cancellation, because the two figures answer two different questions.
The reckoning on the front page counts whole days between a notice date and a shift date and prints the two cut-off dates those figures fall on. It is arithmetic and nothing else; what actually applies is whatever the practice and this office have signed.
Where a practice has not set either figure, the office asks for both at the point of the first booking, because a window nobody named is a window nobody can rely on afterwards.
Told early, the date usually finds another home. Told late, it does not.
Practices change their minds, and a rota that never changed would be a rota nobody was using. What matters is when the office hears about it, because the answer changes completely with the number of days left.
A date released outside the cancellation window is released cleanly. The office tells the person placed the same day, the square goes back to open, and the date usually finds another practice because there is still time for it to.
A date released inside the window is a different thing. Somebody has turned other work down to hold it, and the arrangement the practice signed says what happens then. The office does not improvise that on the day; it reads the terms back and applies them.
Where a practice wants to move a date rather than cancel it, that is treated as a new request against the same reference. The person placed is asked whether they will take the new date, and a fresh confirmation goes out if they will.
None of this is adversarial. A practice that tells this office early gets a cooperative answer nearly every time, and the whole point of naming the window at the first booking is so that nobody has to negotiate it in the middle of a difficult week.
A replacement is a new confirmation, not a substitution on paper.
People fall ill, documents lapse and trains stop. When this office cannot supply the name on the confirmation, the practice hears from us before it hears from anybody else, and it hears a plain answer rather than a hopeful one.
Where a replacement is available, the file behind that person is read in full against the same practice list, and a fresh confirmation goes out carrying their name. A confirmation names a person, so swapping the person means issuing a new one rather than crossing a name out.
Where no replacement is available, the office says so as early in the day as it knows, and says it once, clearly. A practice can do a great deal with four hours of notice and almost nothing with forty minutes.
On the day itself, a late start is reported as a late start with a time attached. Reception can work with fifteen minutes; what it cannot work with is a shift that is going to be twenty minutes late described as being on its way.
Everything in this section reaches the practice through the same address as a rota gap does, and is followed by a written note, because a difficult message delivered on the telephone still has to exist in writing afterwards.