If you have online bookings set up, one of the things you'll want to do is specify the available times shown to your patients! For example, do you want to display appointments every hour? Every half-hour? Every fifteen minutes?
The duration between appointments will depend on what you have set as your default appointment type. Read on for more!
Set the time between appointments in online bookings
When a patient is looking at your online bookings page, they'll see when your appointments are available. In the below example, we can see that this practitioner offers appointments every hour:
The reason for this is because the practitioner's default appointment type (in their practitioner settings) is set to something that is one hour in duration:
If you're not sure of the duration of your default appointment type, you can double-check it in your appointment type settings, as in the example below.
So, using the example above, with a one-hour long default appointment type, the practitioner's "start times" on the online booking page will appear one hour apart—until other bookings are made on that day.
Below, we can see that some appointments start "on the hour" (at the :00 mark), but others appear to be more random—for example, in the afternoon, we have availability for 12:00, but the next time is 2:30:
So, why the weird gap? In this situation, an appointment that ends at 2:30 would have been booked—potentially online, or potentially "internally" (by a staff member). This means it's "pushed out" the start time of any appointments after that. And, being that the duration of the default appointment type is 60 minutes, it means that things will remain 60 minutes apart—until something else is booked to "close up" that space (such as a 30-minute appointment from 3:30 to 4:00, for example).
With all of this said, you might be wondering…can I enforce appointments to always start on the hour (or another specific time), no matter what?
Unfortunately, no—while you can try to make this happen by making your default appointment type an hour-long one (using the previous example), there won't be a way to outright prevent any appointments from being booked sometime during the hour, unless all you offer are 60 minute appointments and never book anything outside of that :00 mark.
If you still have questions on this, feel free to reach out to our support team—we're happy to help! 🤗