Glossary¶
Plain-language definitions of the terms used throughout this documentation and in the system. If a word on a screen is not here, ask and it can be added.
People¶
Clinician -- Anyone who appears on the rota: partners, salaried doctors, locums, and trainees.
Partner -- A practice partner. Measured in WTE percentage, books annual leave in whole weeks, and has cannot-work/must-work days rather than a fixed pattern.
Salaried doctor -- Employed on a fixed weekly pattern of days, books leave in individual days.
Locum -- A temporary doctor booked for specific dates. Locum bookings bypass the usual availability checks and are always pinned.
Resident doctor -- A trainee (FY = Foundation Year, ST = Specialty Trainee). Supernumerary: they do not count toward minimum staffing, cannot take part in shift swaps, and do not participate in leave rounds.
Rota administrator -- The person (you, if you are reading the Admin Guide) who runs the rota day to day: approvals, generation, adjustments, reports.
Dashboard Admin -- In the system, an administrator account: sees the admin dashboard and its tools. (Distinct from "System Admin", the underlying technical Django admin site.)
Participant -- In a leave round, a clinician eligible to select weeks: anyone with a working term overlapping the round year that carries annual leave entitlement.
Contracts and time¶
Working term -- A dated record of one clinician's arrangement: contract type, working days or WTE percentage, leave entitlement, duty participation. Everything the system calculates starts from the working term, and clinicians can have several terms over time (but only one active on any date).
WTE (Whole Time Equivalent) -- The fraction of full-time someone works. A partner at "60%" works 0.6 of a full-time week; targets, duty shares, and fairness comparisons are all proportional to WTE.
Session -- A half-day unit. A working day is two sessions (measured out of 9 per week for salaried entitlement calculations).
Entitlement -- How much annual leave a clinician has, for the current working term: weeks for partners, days for salaried doctors and trainees.
Quota -- The running balance of entitlement: entitlement, plus any adjustments, minus approved leave. Annual leave draws it down; other leave types do not.
Adjustment (Leave Adjustment) -- A manual addition or subtraction to entitlement — the only way leave is carried over between terms.
Reporting period -- A date range used for target and fairness calculations (configured as two six-month periods per year by default).
Fixed period -- Roughly the next six weeks of the rota, which is settled: shifts inside it are protected from automatic changes, leave cannot normally be booked inside it, and cancelling approved leave inside it needs approval.
Holiday period -- A configured practice closure (typically Christmas and New Year). Leave cannot be booked on those dates at all.
Bank holiday -- A public holiday. Which dates count depends on the UK nation configured. Bank holidays affect minimums (the day after one needs more duty doctors) and are pro-rated in workload targets rather than counted fully.
The rota¶
Shift -- One clinician's scheduled session-day: Standard (a normal working day), Duty (duty doctor that day), Study Leave, or Coroners.
Duty doctor -- The doctor holding the duty/on-call responsibility for a day. Normally 1 per day, more on the first working day after a bank holiday. Duty burden is shared fairly in proportion to WTE (see the Duty Fairness report).
Pinned shift -- A shift marked with a padlock: protected from being changed or deleted when the rota is regenerated. Manual additions and locum bookings are pinned by default.
Minimum staffing -- The configured number of doctors that must be on each day of the week (e.g. 9 on a Monday). The generator fills toward it and alerts fire below it.
Minimum staffing rule -- A time-limited override that raises or lowers a day's minimum when its conditions hold (specific weekdays, named clinicians working, date window).
Deficit -- The gap between what a day or clinician has and what it should have: day deficit = below minimum staffing; clinician deficit = below their WTE-proportional target. Phase 3 fills the largest deficits first.
Phase -- One of the six steps of rota generation: (1) fixed shifts, (2) alternate-week patterns, (3) fill to minimum, (4) partner weekly minimums, (5) WTE balance optimisation, (6) duty doctors.
Generation -- Running the phases to build a rota for a date range. Safe to re-run: pinned shifts are always preserved, and unpinned ones only replaced if you tick Confirm Overwrite.
Alert -- An automatic warning: a day below minimum staffing (critical), a day nearing it (warning), or a clinician overworked relative to their target.
SystmOne sync -- Marks that a shift has been entered into the clinical system. Synced shifts (green tick) can no longer be swapped.
Leave and rounds¶
Leave request -- A dated request for time off, submitted by a clinician or created by an admin, then approved, denied, or cancelled.
Leave types -- Annual Leave (uses quota), Day Not Working (partners, no quota), Study Leave, Coroner's Court, Planned Sick (admin-added only).
Cancellation request -- When a clinician cancels approved leave that falls inside the fixed period, the cancellation itself waits for admin approval.
Annual Leave Round -- The once-a-year staged allocation of next year's leave: an open selection window, a group resolution phase on the Demand Board, then conversion of the agreed weeks into approved leave.
Week selection -- In a round, a clinician's claim on one Monday-to-Friday week, ranked by priority (1 = most wanted).
Round cap / Late-year limit -- The maximum selections a clinician may hold in a round (normally 4 weeks) / in August–December (normally 3).
Contested week -- A week where more than 3 people would be off. Contested weeks are discussed by the group, never automatically denied.
Demand Board -- The year grid of weeks showing everyone's selections, projected on screen during the resolution discussion.
Ghost -- On the Demand Board, the dotted record of where a selection originally sat before an admin moved or cancelled it.
Cover check -- An advisory pass/fail per week on the board: could minimum staffing still be met? Informs the discussion; never blocks anything.
Conversion -- Turning an agreed week selection into approved leave at the end of a round.
Leave booking cutoff -- An optional date beyond which normal leave booking is held closed (typically while a round runs), shown as "Awaiting Release" on the booking calendar.
Reports¶
Equivalency -- A count normalised to full-time: shifts (or duty days, or Mondays) divided by WTE. Used to compare part-time and full-time clinicians fairly.
Fair difference (Fair Diff) -- How far a clinician is from their fair share of shifts, per the group average.
Target shifts -- The number of shifts a clinician should work in a period, given their WTE, leave, and bank holidays.