A first assessment takes an hour. A follow-up takes thirty minutes. A quick review before someone goes back to playing sport might take twenty, and a complex case with two problem areas can run to ninety.
Most online booking tools were built for a haircut, where every slot is the same size. Point one at a physiotherapy diary and you get a choice between two bad options: make every slot an hour and waste half of them, or make every slot thirty minutes and have new patients double-book themselves into a slot that cannot hold their assessment.
Neither is necessary. The length belongs to the treatment, not to the diary.
Set the length on the service, not the calendar
The fix is to describe what you offer as a list of services, and give each one its own duration. An initial assessment is sixty minutes. A standard follow-up is thirty. A sports massage is forty-five. The patient picks the thing they need, and the diary works out how much room that takes.
This sounds obvious and it changes two things that matter:
- Nobody books the wrong length. A new patient cannot select a thirty-minute follow-up, because follow-up is not offered to someone who has never been seen. You decide what a new patient is allowed to choose.
- Your day packs properly. Three thirty-minute follow-ups fit into the ninety minutes between two assessments. A diary built on one fixed slot size cannot do that, and the gaps it leaves are unpaid.
In Webkio each bookable service carries its own duration, so the available times a patient sees are already correct for the thing they chose.
Buffer time is not padding
Physiotherapy has a handover that a haircut does not. Notes get written. The plinth gets wiped down. Someone needs two minutes to get their shoes back on and ask the question they were saving until the end.
If your slots are back to back, that time comes out of the next appointment, and by three in the afternoon you are twenty minutes behind and apologising to everyone.
Set a buffer on the service and the diary stops offering a start time that does not really exist. Five minutes after a follow-up and ten after an assessment is a common shape. It is not lost time. It is the time you were already spending, now visible.
What the patient actually sees
A patient does not want to understand your diary. They want three things: can you see me, when, and how much.
A services list answers all three at once if you let it. Name the service in the words a patient would use rather than the words a clinician would. "First visit, including assessment and treatment plan" tells someone more than "Initial consultation, MSK". Put the length and the price next to it, because the two questions arrive together.
There is more on this in what patients look for on a clinic website.
When the practice has more than one physiotherapist
Durations and practitioners interact, and getting it wrong produces a diary that looks full and is not.
If one of your physiotherapists does not do acupuncture, that service should not offer their name. If one works Tuesdays and Thursdays only, their availability should reflect that rather than being handled by you remembering to decline the booking afterwards.
Each practitioner carries their own hours and their own list of what they do. We go through the detail of this in multi-practitioner clinic scheduling.
When a session overruns anyway
It still will. A patient discloses something at minute fifty-five, and you are not going to look at the clock and stop.
What a properly built diary gives you is a smaller and later consequence. One overrun eats the buffer rather than the next appointment. Two overruns put you ten minutes behind instead of forty. The aim is not a day that never slips, it is a day that recovers.
Where to start
You do not need to model the whole practice before taking a booking. Start with two services: a first assessment at its real length, and a standard follow-up at its real length. Add the buffer you actually take. Publish it.
Add the specialist treatments once you can see how the first two behave in a real week. Most practices find the second week is when the durations get corrected, and that correction is easier against real bookings than against a guess.
If you are weighing up moving off the phone entirely, stop taking clinic appointments by phone covers what changes and what to keep.
FAQ
Can a patient book two appointments back to back?
Yes, and it is worth deciding whether you want them to. Two consecutive follow-ups is usually fine. Two assessments in a row is often somebody who has misread the page, and it is cheaper to prevent it at booking than to untangle it afterwards.
How do I change a service length without disturbing bookings already made?
Appointments already in the diary keep the length they were booked at. Changing the service affects what gets offered from that point on, so the safe order is to change it, then look at the next fortnight to see that the new shape is what you expected.
Is it better to list many services or a few?
Few. A patient choosing between four clear options books; a patient choosing between fourteen goes back to the phone. Most practices find that three or four cover the large majority of what they do, with anything unusual handled by an enquiry.
What about a treatment whose length you genuinely cannot predict?
Book the part you can predict. An assessment with an unknown treatment attached is still a sixty-minute assessment, and the follow-up gets booked at the end of it when you know what it needs.