Waiting List Management

Waiting list management is at the heart of efficient patient scheduling. Whether you manage outpatient clinics, inpatient admissions or day-case procedures, keeping an accurate, visible and up-to-date waiting list directly affects how quickly patients are seen and how fairly that access is distributed.

Diarybook provides a dedicated waiting list module that sits alongside your existing client records, groups and appointments — giving your team a single place to track who is waiting, how long they have been waiting, and what needs to happen next.

Why waiting list management matters

Every healthcare service that accepts referrals or bookings maintains a waiting list in some form — whether that is a spreadsheet, a paper diary or a module in a patient administration system. The challenge is rarely knowing that people are waiting; it is knowing who needs to be seen when, and being confident that no one has been overlooked.

Poor waiting list visibility leads to real problems: patients breach target waiting times without anyone noticing, clinical priority is not reflected in the order patients are scheduled, and time is lost chasing information that should be at the scheduler’s fingertips.

Good waiting list management means your team can answer three questions at any moment: who is closest to breaching their target, who has been validated recently, and who is ready to be scheduled into the next available slot.

What Diarybook offers

Lists by type

Diarybook supports three waiting list types, each reflecting a different care pathway:

• OPD (Outpatient) — patients waiting for a first or follow-up clinic appointment.
• Inpatient — patients waiting for admission and an overnight stay.
• Day Case — patients waiting for a procedure that does not require an overnight stay.

Each list type carries its own default target waiting times, ensuring that breach dates are calculated correctly from the moment a patient is added.

Priority and breach dates

Every entry on a waiting list has a clinical priority — Urgent, Soon or Routine — and a corresponding breach date. The breach date is the latest date by which the patient should be seen or admitted in order to meet the target waiting time for their priority level.

Diarybook calculates breach dates automatically based on configurable targets. Targets can be set in days, weeks or working days and can be customised per list to reflect the specific requirements of each service. Where a clinician or scheduler needs to override the calculated date, manual mode allows the breach date to be set directly.

Suspension and clock management

When a patient is temporarily unable to attend — whether for medical reasons, personal circumstances or because they are receiving treatment elsewhere — their waiting list entry can be suspended. While suspended, the waiting time clock pauses. When the patient is resumed, the clock continues from where it left off and the breach date adjusts forward accordingly.

Where a suspension has affected the breach date, Diarybook clearly indicates this on the list view so that your team always understands why a displayed date may differ from what was originally set.

Status tracking

Each waiting list entry moves through a clear set of statuses that reflect the patient’s journey:

• Waiting — on the list, not yet scheduled.
• Scheduled — a TCI (To Come In) date has been assigned.
• Attended — the patient attended their appointment or admission.
• Suspended — temporarily paused, with the reason and dates recorded.
• Removed — taken off the list, with a documented reason such as patient request, transfer or clinical decision.

Every status change is logged with the user who made it, the date and any supporting notes — providing a full audit trail for each patient’s time on the list.

Assigned users and filtering

One or more team members can be assigned to a waiting list entry, making it easy to divide work across a team and to filter the list to show only the entries each person is responsible for. Combined with filters for status and priority, this means your team can quickly focus on the patients who need attention now.

Client validation

Over time, waiting lists can become inaccurate. Patients may no longer need their appointment, may have been seen elsewhere, or may have moved. Client validation is the process of reaching out to patients to confirm they still require their place on the list.

Diarybook supports validation through SMS, where a secure link is sent to the patient. The patient follows the link to a validation page — which can be hosted through services such as HSEBOOK or any suitable web platform — where they can confirm they wish to remain on the list, indicate a change in their circumstances, or request removal. Their response is recorded against the waiting list entry and the date of last validation is visible on the list.

This keeps your list current, reduces the number of wasted appointment slots, and ensures that patients who are still waiting are not displaced by entries that are no longer active.

Integration with client records

Waiting list entries in Diarybook are linked directly to the client record. All of a patient’s demographic details, appointment history, group memberships, progress notes and files remain in one place. A patient can appear on more than one waiting list at the same time — for example, awaiting both an outpatient review and a day-case procedure — without any duplication of their core record.

From the client view, staff can see every list a patient is currently on and can add them to a new list directly. From the waiting list view, clicking through to a patient opens their full record with the waiting list entry detail alongside it.

Converting from client groups

If your service already uses Diarybook’s client groups to manage cohorts of patients, you can convert an existing group into a waiting list directly. The group’s members are carried across and the group moves from the Client Groups section into the Waiting Lists section. This provides a straightforward migration path for teams that have been managing informal waiting lists through groups and are ready to move to structured waiting list management.

Getting started

To begin using waiting lists in Diarybook, you can either create a new list from the Waiting Lists section or convert an existing client group. The following pages in this guide walk through each step:

• Getting Started with Waiting Lists — creating and configuring a list, choosing types and setting targets.
• Adding and Managing Clients on a Waiting List — the day-to-day workflow of adding patients, setting priorities and using the list view.
• Changing Status and Suspensions — moving patients through statuses, suspending and resuming entries, and maintaining the audit trail.
• Client Validation — setting up outbound validation, what patients see, and how responses feed back into the list.
• Understanding Breach Dates and Targets — how breach dates are calculated, how suspensions affect them, and what the visual indicators mean.