Solutions
Timetabling software for medical schools
Medical education breaks most timetabling software because it is not really one timetable. It is lectures, small-group teaching, laboratory sessions, clinical placements and hospital rotations, each with different rules, running simultaneously.
Why medical schools are different
A conventional timetable schedules a cohort into rooms for fixed weekly sessions. A medical curriculum schedules small groups into rotations that last weeks, across sites the university does not own, supervised by clinicians whose availability is governed by a hospital rota rather than an academic calendar.
Meanwhile the same students attend conventional lectures, laboratory sessions with hard capacity limits, and small-group teaching that requires the group to be split differently again. All of it has to be clash-free for each individual student, not merely for each group.
- Clinical rotations and placements spanning weeks rather than hours
- Teaching sites the institution does not control, with their own calendars
- Clinician availability governed by clinical duty, not teaching load
- Small-group teaching with different group divisions per activity type
- Laboratory sessions with hard capacity and equipment limits
- Individual-student clash checking across every combination
How Wise Timetable handles it
The entity model does not assume a session is a weekly hour in a room. Reservations can be one-off, weekly, or follow any recurring pattern across a semester or year, which is what a rotation actually is. Event types are fully customisable, so your institution defines categories that reflect clinical teaching rather than forcing everything into lecture, seminar and lab.
Student groups can be combined and subdivided freely, with the system calculating total attendance across combined cohorts and suggesting appropriately sized rooms — adjustable by hand where you know only part of a group will attend.
For clinician availability, the answer is the same one that works everywhere else: open the web booking system to them and let them book the hours they can teach. Chasing hospital consultants by email is a losing game. See how availability collection works.
Examinations, where it matters most
Medical examinations are where group-level clash checking fails visibly. Wise Timetable's exam module checks at student level across every module combination, and handles seating plans, invigilator assignment and minimum gaps between papers.
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.