HosPortal's activity-based rosters are most suited where there is typically a single person per activity, the activities are regular (e.g. every weekday), and there is no need to show a location or the location is the same every time the activity happens. Examples are on-call rosters and daytime trainee duties.
If your rosters are not like this, you may be better off using HosPortal's location-based rosters, explained here.
Reviewing your roster groups
You should already have created an activity-based roster group to manage your activity-based rosters. In the older version of HosPortal these would have been called 'Call'. You can see your roster groups on the Admin page. You can see the type of roster group in A below.
Creating a new roster, or copying an existing roster
Go to the relevant roster page and click Admin (B) to review your existing rosters.
Click the '+Add' (C) button to create a new roster, or click 'View' (D) to either edit an existing roster or duplicate an existing roster's settings into a new roster.
Adding and editing roster settings
In the Roster panel (E):
Create the Name of the roster as you want it to appear on the roster pages and exports
The Description is optional, and only appears on this page. It can be used for notes about the roster for other administrators.
Tags are used for reporting to categorise data across multiple roster, for instance to report the hours or number of sessions across all after-hours rosters. The tags need to be first defined on the Admin page.
Colour is optional, and is used to distinguish each roster. If there is no colour the roster will adopt the colour defined in the Roster Group.
Start date is the first date on the shift.
End date is optional and should remain as 'no end date' if it is intended for the roster to be perpetual. You can set an end date later.
Click "Save" once you have filled all the mandatory fields
Creating slots
You need a slot for each person regularly expected to be on the roster. Many activity-based rosters typically only have one slot. It is possible to add additional people to the roster on an ad-hoc basis when you are building the roster.
For each slot, define the roles of the users required. If the person could be one of a number of roles, then include all the roles. You can optionally define the Skills and Teams of the users, if you are using these features.
If more than one person is usually required, use the '+Add slot' button to create a second slot. You can then also re-order the slots by using the sliders (I). In the example below the roster has 2 slots, and therefore requires 2 people: a Consultant as the first-listed person and either a Consultant or a Registrar as the 2nd-listed person.
Defining the shift times
The Shifts section (J) defines the times of the shift for each day. Shits can be defined for each day of the week and you can have multiple shifts on each day by clicking the +Add button.
You need to define the behaviour on public holidays separately (K). The options are
Do not occur - the shift does not occur on public holidays, and no one is expected to be staffed on a holiday.
Occur as usual - the shift has the same hours as any non-holiday day.
Customise - the holiday hours are different to non-holiday hours. If you select this option then you have the ability to define behaviour by each type of holiday day.
In the example above the shift times are 12 hours from 1800-0800 on weekdays, and 24 hours 0800-0800 on weekends and public holidays.
The shift name (L) is optional, and will appear on the roster if you want to show different names on different shifts in the roster view, for instance if you want to make clear the weekend or holiday rosters that are different to the weekday rosters. If you leave the name blank the shift name will default to the name of the roster.
Exemptions
HosPortal assumes by default that everyone of the relevant role for the slots is eligible to do the roster. So if you define a slot to require a Consultant, then all Consultants are assumed to be able to do the roster.
Many facilities have exemptions, for instance because of the type of person required to do the roster, or because people over a certain age are exempt from overnight on-call rosters. You can list the users with exemptions in section (H).
You can add users to the exemption list by click on edit and selecting user, then save.
The rest of the users who can be allocated to the roster will be listed under the 'User list'.
Saving
Remember to click 'Save' in each of the categories (E, F, G, H) before exiting!