Wise Timetable

Medical education

Planning clinical rotations for a whole year

A rotation plan is a small timetable of its own: groups down one side, weeks along the other, a capacity on every department, and lectures the same students still have. Here is the order that works, and what to check before anything reaches a student.

Why a rotation is not an ordinary timetable

A teaching timetable places hours. A rotation places weeks: a small group spends two or four weeks in surgery, then psychiatry, then community care, and every group has to pass each speciality once in the year. The places are hospital departments the institution does not own, each taking only so many students at a time. And the same students still have lectures, seminars and examinations, which do not stop because a placement started.

That is why rotations planned in a spreadsheet go wrong in the same three ways: a department is quietly over-full in one week, a group is sent to a ward in a week it has lectures, and somebody ends the year a speciality short. None of the three is visible in the spreadsheet until a student points it out.

The order that works

  1. Agree the specialities

    What every student must pass, named the way your faculty names them. Settle this list before any site is discussed: it is what every later check counts against.

  2. Record every department as a place with a capacity

    The department is where the students physically are, at a site, of one speciality, taking so many students at once, with the clinicians who mentor them. A department without a capacity is the one that ends up over-full.

  3. Write down what the placement owes

    How many hours a student owes, on which days and at what times, and how many weeks of each speciality. The hours are the figure a student will ask about in May.

  4. Take out the weeks that are not available

    Holidays, examination periods, the weeks kept for teaching. Leaving them out at the start is cheaper than moving blocks out of them later.

  5. Let a proposal place the blocks

    With the groups, the weeks and the departments known, placing the blocks is a search, not a judgement. Let software propose it — and insist that whatever it cannot place is named, not left out.

  6. Fix by hand what no rule knows

    A group that must be at one hospital in one week, for a reason that is nowhere in the data. Place it by hand, lock it, and let the next proposal work around it.

  7. Hand it over, then tell the students

    Only a finished plan goes into the timetable, and only then do the students see it. A draft that reaches a student is a correction that reaches a hundred.

The checks that matter

  • Capacity, week by week. Each department’s load in every week of the plan, against what it can take.
  • Lectures. Every week in which a group still has lectures, and the lectures a block would collide with, named.
  • Hours owed. Each group’s planned hours against the hours the placement owes. Fewer has to be said while it can still be fixed.
  • Nothing silently missing. A speciality with no department yet, or with every department full, means a block that cannot be placed. That has to be a warning with the group’s name in it, never a plan that merely looks complete.

What a student needs to see

Not the whole grid. Where they are this week — the site, the department, the address — who their mentor is, the days and times, how many hours they have done against how many they owe, and the rest of their year in order. Between blocks, where they go next and from when.

And it has to be the plan that is in the timetable, not the one the office is still drafting: a student who acts on a draft is a student in the wrong hospital.

Doing it in Wise Timetable

Wise Timetable has a module for exactly this, in the standard licence: the steps above as six steps on one screen, departments recorded as rooms of the timetable, a proposal in one click with every breach named, blocks placed by hand kept, and a hand-off that writes the plan into the timetable as ordinary lessons. Each student has a page with this week, the address, the mentors and the hours. Clinical placements, step by step, and the guides for the student office and for students.

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