Calculating Capacity
For the lead organisation setting up clinics, we've provided an easy way to calculate how many patients in total you will be able to vaccinate in each clinic you have set up.
👉 Please see our handy vaccination capacity planner template, 👈
Below, you will see some examples of some clinics:
We calculate capacity in the following way:
Length of session x Patients per hour* = Total capacity.
e.g. For the clinic on the 20th December in the picture above, this clinic is 5 hours long. The practice has said they can see 9 patients per hour, therefore the total amount of patients they will be able to vaccinate is 45 patients.
We've also added an extra 500% allowance for bookings as we don't expect all patients invited to want the vaccine or contact the practice to be vaccinated - therefore, if you have the capacity for 50 patients for one clinic, you can actually invite 250 patients for booking. However, please note the upload limit per CSV file is 500 patients. We don't count 'to manually book' patients in this calculation, to free up more capacity for self-service patients.
*Patients per hour
This needs to be the total amount of patients that ALL the vaccinators will be able to vaccinate in one hour. For example, if you have two nurses vaccination - one that can vaccine 6 patients an hour, and another that can vaccinate 8 an hour - the total will be 14 patients per hour.
Please note that clinics set up in this way do not include breaks - you will need to calculate capacity accordingly.
You will also need to make sure your session length matches up with the length you're setting for each individual appointment. For example, if each of your appointments will last 15 minutes, it's best not to set a session to 70 minutes, for example, as you will have 10 minutes at the end that won't be one full appointment.
🚨The most important thing to draw your attention to is to remind practices that they’ll want to start slow. Start by uploading small groups of patients first. You can always upload more later. If more patients are invited than there are available slots, patients still receive an SMS invite but will be unable to book if others book it out before them. To avoid this, we recommend dividing slots up fairly between the participating practices, and inform them how many patients can be invited. 🚨
Updating Capacity
First, unpublish your clinic
❗ Before you can amend your live clinic capacity, you need to unpublish it. Remember to set it live again when you're done editing, or your patients will no longer see it.
To unpublish a clinic once you have set it live, you can do so by pressing the 'toggle' in the set live column so it turns grey again.
Next, amend your times/patients per hour
To update your capacity, you can change any combination of the start time, the end time, or how many patients per hour you will vaccinate.
You can select 'edit' (the pencil icon) once your clinic is unpublished, where you will see these options now editable.
Save and re-publish
Once you're happy with your changes, you can click Save.
Remember once you've saved to set your clinic to 'live'! You do this by switching the toggle back to green.
❗ You will not be able to reduce the capacity of a clinic below the point where it interferes with existing patient bookings, you will be told if that is the case when you click the save button.
If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to chat with us using the green message bubble in the bottom right-hand corner of this page. 👉