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 or for this and future weeks on the same weekday. You will have a third option to apply a Run to a 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 are able to assign a Care Professional to the run. Click on the run and 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.
You are able to still re-assign individual visits even if part of a run. This will then show the run as partially allocated.
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
Step-by-step guide
You may find the below creating and managing runs flowchart helpful, click here to download the PDF!
Birdie Academy video