How it works
A month on Medrota, start to finish
The process is the one your department already runs. Medrota just does the bookkeeping, the chasing and the first draft, and keeps the scheduler in charge of everything that matters.
The cycle
Seven dates, one calm month
1st
The window opens
Doctors submit structured requests for the coming month: specific days off, a morning or evening preference, chosen night dates, a protected weekend. Sessionals post the dates they can cover. Everything lands in one inbox instead of twenty text threads.
10th · 13th · 15th
Reminders chase, the window closes
Anyone who hasn't submitted gets an automatic nudge on the 10th, the 13th and the morning of the 15th. Late requests aren't locked out; the scheduler can still accept them right up until the month is published.
Generation day
The engine drafts the month
It continues the senior SR-call alternation and the night-group cycle from the anchors, reserves the med resident's seat, blocks out approved leave, fills the 40-hour base around day-off requests, thins weekends to the reduced template, distributes paid sessions by the equity tallies, and marks D1 and D2 automatically. The draft arrives with a report: every request honored, partial or declined with the reason, every violation surfaced, every open seat counted.
Review
The scheduler overrules freely
The grid looks like the department's own spreadsheet. Click a cell and reassign it: the picker shows who's eligible and warns about overlaps, night weeks and capability, but the human always wins. Manual edits lock, so regenerating with a different balance never undoes a decision already made.
Publish
Everyone finds out at once
Publishing emails every doctor a link to their shifts, optionally with the Excel export attached, the same file the noticeboard has always seen. From that moment the calendar is live for the whole department.
The live month
Churn without chaos
Someone falls ill: they report the absence, the seat flags, the scheduler reopens or reassigns it. Someone wants a Saturday back: they propose a give-up or a swap, the counterpart accepts, the scheduler approves, the grid updates. The open-session board pays the volunteers: first eligible claim wins, checked for capability and double-booking, with the scheduler notified and able to revert.
Next month
Fairness carries over
Nights, weekends and session counts feed the next generation, so the same people don't quietly absorb every unsociable shift. The tallies your scheduler used to keep by hand are computed, always current, and exported with every workbook.
The paper trail
What generation day hands you
Not a fait accompli: a draft plus its own confession. Outcomes per request, violations if any exist, the open seats it chose to offer, and the equity picture.
Generation report · August 2026
Equity tallies
Hard lines
What the engine will not do
- Assess2 seats never hold unauthorized staff, even under pressure.
- Every night seat is either named or explicitly open, never silently empty.
- Seniors never appear on the night rota.
- Nobody is double-booked onto overlapping shifts.
- Every change to a published rota is written to an audit log.
- Manual decisions survive regeneration.
Starting
Coming from spreadsheets?
Upload the old workbooks and Medrota backfills history: a dry run shows exactly what it read, fuzzy matching survives the typos, and nothing is committed until you confirm. Day one starts with your archive intact and your equity tallies already warm.