Overview of Student Clinical Assignment Scheduler

Wouldn't it be nice to send a student to a clinical location by pulling a site name out of a Bingo ball cage and handing one to each student? In the real world, we know it's a lot more complicated. Our system allows you to create student assignments quickly, allowing you to take into account:

How many hours of clinical experience has been assigned to each student?
What are the available clinical days for the student, preceptor and the site?
Are there limitations of how many a students a site. or a shift at a site, allows?
At the end of their training, will the student have had exposure to different experiences offered by different equipment, activities, patient types, settings?
The steps:

1. Create filters
Create student filters.  Filters should be relevant for the rotations you intend to schedule. If students are assigned to sites or days of externship by cohort, then place the students in the corresponding filters. On the other hand, perhaps you have a student group that will be training only with children during this rotation, or on a specific piece of equipment or in a particular department. Create filters defining the students by the appropriate training criteria.

Create site or shift filters in the same manner from the Settings page.  If you have a lot of sites, you may wish to define either sites (locations) or shifts at a site. Perhaps you'd like to define pediatric sites, so only those sites are available for assigning to students who will be training solely with children during the rotation. Or perhaps you'd like to define by location (NW Gotham City) or by available department or equipment (Centers with MRIs). Perhaps certain sites are only available during certain times of the year (Spring Rotation Sites). You may find that it's not necessary to create any site or shift filters if you need the full range of sites available for assignments.

2. Create site shifts
From the Create Site Shifts page, you will be asked to define shifts for each site to which a student will be assigned. You'll be asked to create a site code (once only), and a shift code (this will be unnecessary but available in future versions), as well as define the hours, lunch or break period length, time of day the shift occurs, and maximum number of students allowed. Multiple shifts can be defined, such as weekend shifts. If it's important to know the time of day a shift takes place (such as overnight or evening), create several shifts and select different day types. You'll be able to filter on all day or morning shifts across all sites after you've done so. Site shifts only need to be created once and need only be edited or deleted if something changes.

3. Define rotation dates
Ahh, rotations - an easy part! A rotation in our system is defined simply as a date range - the beginning and end of when students will be assigned. Create one for each assignment period.

4. Assign students to sites/shifts for the selected rotation
Finally - make your assignments.
When you are happy with the assignment schedule, you can "Publish" the schedule, meaning that it becomes visible to students and site-based persons from a calendar available as a menu link on their home page.