Please note: Runs are available as part of the majority of Birdie packages, excluding Care Management, Starter and Entry packages. Please get in touch if interested in more information on this feature!
What are Runs and why are they so valuable?
Runs have been created to support you in saving travel-time costs and creating permanent and predictable schedules for your Care Professionals. It allows you to group multiple visits into a Run that can be saved and repeated for the future.
Being able to group visits will effectively represent a day for the Care Professionals. They can be grouped via geographical area, care requirements, and double-up runs. You can also make sure there is enough time between visits for travel.
If the original Care Professional falls sick and can't deliver the run, you are able to re-assign the whole run to someone else or you are able to break it into individual visits again.
Runs will be protected during 'auto-allocation' (the optimiser). If the system doesn't find a suitable Care Professional for the whole run, the visits won't be broken up from the run, instead, they will appear unallocated at the top of the rota page.
How to add a Run
There are two ways to add runs:
1) From the Roster tab
2) Clicking your initials, in the top right-hand corner of the agency hub. A drop-down menu will appear, click on Manage runs.
Here you will be able to create, edit and delete the runs.
Once runs are created, you can start adding visits to them by going to the Roster tab and clicking on a visit you would like to add to a run.
Click on Manage visit in runs, this will allow you to select the Run it should belong to.
You can apply the run:
For this visit only
For this and future weeks on the same weekday
For the whole visit schedule (i.e. if that specific visit repeats across Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, for instance, this run will repeat on each of those days).
Simply select from the drop-down menu when adding a visit to any Run
You are then able to add multiple care visits to the run. It will now be wrapped in a run visit:
How to assign Care Professionals to the run
Once you have put a run together you can assign a Care Professional to the run. Click on the run, select a Care Professional from the list and click Assign run.
If some visits in the run are already assigned (i.e. a partially-assigned run), these Care Professionals will be marked on the assignment modal with checkboxes so you can always see if a run is partially allocated already and assign the rest to the same Care Professionals.
How to reassign visits in a run
You can re-assign individual visits even if they are part of a run. You will also be able to reassign visits within a run even if the run is already assigned to another Care Professional.
To do this, select the run and click on the visit that you need to reassign, then click Find alternative carer.
You will now see a pop-up showing you who is already allocated to the visit. From here you can select another Care Professional and click the Allocate carer button.
This visit will now be allocated to the new Care Professional still within the run.
If you want to remove the visit from a run, click on the visit and then on Manage visit in runs.
On the pop-up page, untick the run the visit is currently in, this will appear at the top of the list. Then click Apply to and select for this visit only.
This means that this visit has been removed from this run for just this visit.
Please note: When reassigning visits, do not drag and drop the visits to a new Care Professional. This might result in reassigning the whole run and not the individual visit.
Dealing with multi-carer visits in runs
Runs are for a single person only, this means you can only assign 1 Care Professional to a run.
In order to assign a run to multiple Care Professionals you will need to:
Make the visits inside the run double-ups - this will duplicate the visits on the roster screen
Assign these visits to another run
Each run can be assigned to a different Care Professional
This allows you to mix single and double-up visits in the same run to really optimise the Care Professional's day.
Once a double-up visit is in a run and is shown as multiple boxes on the screen, you can only change one Care Professional at a time to prevent mistakes
When making changes to double up visits in runs, these visits will be unallocated
Runs and Overnight visits
Runs are designed to work within a day's boundary, for example, 20:00 - 23:59. This means that they are not optimised to work alongside the template when the visit in a run is overnight.
If you have primarily overnight visits you can still benefit from using the templating feature by splitting the runs into visits before midnight and runs with visits after midnight.
This way you will be able to apply the template and it will work as normal.
Step by step
In the image below, the visit is for 21:00-9:00, this currently would not work with the template. When added to a run as it would appear as two separate runs.
As this visit starts before midnight start by adding it into a run
Add any other visits into this run that start before midnight
The end time will not impact the run
This run is now optimised for the template.
You will then repeat the same process with a new run for visits starting after midnight. All of the visits start times must be after midnight in order to work and you must create a different run.
In the example below we can see two runs with visits starting before midnight and after midnight.
Step-by-step guide
You may find the below creating and managing runs flowchart helpful, click here to download the PDF!
Birdie Academy video