On Monday the appointment book for Friday looks full. By Friday afternoon two surgeries have stood empty. Did reception need more bookings at the start of the week, or did booked time disappear later? A single utilisation figure cannot tell you.
A clinic dashboard can follow chair hours from staffed capacity through to bookings and attended visits. Charges belong in a separate check. Each step leads to a different conversation about next week's diary.
Count the chair hours the team can actually book
Start with staffed, bookable hours for each surgery and day. Four surgeries do not give you four full days if only two are staffed. Agree how lunch, meetings, maintenance and emergency slots appear in the schedule. A reserved slot that can still take an emergency appointment should be visible.
Imagine the practice has 32 bookable chair hours on Friday. At Monday's snapshot the diary contains 27 hours, roughly 84% of capacity. By Friday evening the scheduled lengths of attended visits add up to 24 hours, or 75% of the same capacity. The three-hour gap is a net change. New appointments may have been added as others were cancelled.
If the source keeps only the latest appointment status, Friday's export cannot reliably tell you what the diary looked like on Monday. Save a dated snapshot if the question is how busy the clinic looked when staffing decisions were made. Label whether attended time uses scheduled duration or actual time in the surgery.
Separate no-shows from slots reception managed to refill
Keep late cancellations, no-shows and rescheduled visits separate. A late cancellation may give reception enough time to call someone on the waiting list. A no-show becomes apparent when the appointment should have started. The two patterns call for different responses.
The example below shows why both appointment counts and lost minutes matter. Each row starts with an original booking and follows what happened to that time in the same surgery.
| Event | Original slot | Time left empty |
|---|---|---|
| Late cancellation, fully refilled | 60 minutes | 0 minutes |
| No-show | 30 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Late cancellation, partly refilled | 60 minutes | 20 minutes |
Review attended visits with no recorded charge
Take completed appointments and link them to charge records where the source allows it. A visit can include several charge lines. Count the visit once and keep the original charge lines available for reconciliation.
Agree how long to allow before checking an appointment. If yesterday's charges only reach the reporting system this afternoon, a morning list will flag visits too early. Separate visits that should be free, those with an uncertain link and those missing an expected charge. Someone familiar with the booking can then check the underlying record.
A practice meeting can work with hours, counts and exceptions at site level. Authorised staff can resolve individual bookings in the practice system. A useful first delivery is one reconciled week and a named person who knows what to do with each exception.
Common questions
How should we calculate the no-show rate?
One workable definition is no-shows divided by attended visits plus no-shows for completed days. Exclude cancelled, rescheduled and unresolved bookings from both sides and show their counts separately. Display the definition alongside the rate so every clinic uses the same denominator.
Can we start with an appointment export?
Yes, if it includes fields such as surgery, appointment time, duration and status. Add the staffed schedule to calculate utilisation. Reviewing uncharged visits also requires a charge extract and a reliable way to match charges to appointments.