Sessions are a neat way to put a visual template on your calendar, to show when certain areas of your calendar are set aside for specific reasons.

These could include times of the day set aside for Pain Clinics or Emergency slots, or certain times of the day you like to reserve for Private plan patients.

They are also a good way of showing which practitioner is working in a particular surgery if you use the rooms view in the calendar. We have a web page to help you with Rooms in the Calendar.

These are purely for your visual reference and mark the area of the days selected with either a border or a shaded background area:

Session using a Border:

Session using a Background:

Hovering the mouse pointer over the info icon in the top right corner of the session will show you a description of the session.

This requires access to the Settings menu, which is only available to users with Level 4 (Administrator) permissions.

Go to Settings > Diary > Session Appointments tab. You can add, edit or remove your Sessions in here.

New Session Appointment allows you to create one. These are the options you have:

Title: This tells you what the session is for and displays at the top of the border when displayed in the calendar using Border, or when hovering over the information icon when using Background. It also helps when you come to edit or remove them in this menu in future.

Colour: This will dictate the colour of the border or the background shading of the session. Remember to click OK in the colour palette when you have chosen your special colour.

Start and End Times: The area of the day that is highlighted.

Practitioners or Rooms: Tick which books you want to show the sessions in. They can be applied to Practitioners or Rooms, but can be applied to more than one of each type.

Start and End Dates: State when you want to start showing these sessions and when they should end.

Occurs every: You may have picked Tuesdays and Thursdays for example. This is where you state if you want the sessions to show every Tuesday and Thursday, every other week, etc.

Display in Calendar as: Background, Border or Both. You can see above how each of these look - choose which you prefer. Blocking areas out for certain types of work work better as Background and marking days in Rooms as worked by certain practitioners work well as Borders, but the choice is yours.

When you are happy with your settings, click Save. You will then start to build up a list of the Sessions in your system. You can copy, edit and delete them using the options next to each Session in the list.