Waitlist

What it's for

A canceled slot is money on the floor. The waitlist holds patients who want an earlier appointment — added by the desk, or by patients themselves from the public booking page — so an opening gets filled instead of wasted. Angel does the filling: when a slot frees up, the offer goes out on its own.

The entry lifecycle

An entry is Waiting until a slot opens. When one is offered it becomes Offered and the patient gets a WhatsApp message; from there it turns Booked (they took it), Declined (they passed), or Expired (the two-hour hold ran out). The desk can Cancel an entry at any point, and a patient can cancel their own.

Nothing is lost when an offer falls through — a declined or expired entry stays on the list, and Back to queue puts the patient back in line.

When a slot opens

Cancel an appointment, or move it to another time, and the slot it leaves behind is offered automatically to the first person in that doctor's queue. "First" means:

• the same doctor,
• a preferred date that matches the slot's day, or no preferred date at all,
• oldest entry first — that's what the #1 · #2 position on each row means,
• skipping anyone who already has an appointment with that doctor that day. Staying on the list while holding a far-off booking is normal; offering a second slot on a day they're already booked is just a double-booking.

The patient gets a WhatsApp message with Confirm and Cancel buttons and two hours to answer. Confirm books them in and the appointment appears on the calendar. Decline passes the same slot straight to the next person in line. If nobody answers, the hold lapses, the entry is marked Expired, and the slot is free again for the desk to offer.

Slots in the past are never offered — cancelling yesterday's no-show frees nothing.

Working the list

The queue runs itself, but the desk overrides it whenever the phone is faster:

• Offer a time — hold a specific slot for a specific patient and message them about it. Same two-hour hold. Use it when a doctor says they can squeeze someone in.
• Offer another time — moves the hold to a different slot; the one they were holding goes to the next person in line automatically.
• Book in — they said yes on the phone. Books the appointment immediately and sends the usual confirmation. If they're already holding a slot, Book held slot takes that one.
• Back to queue — puts a declined, expired or canceled entry back to Waiting.
• Remove — takes them off the list. If they were holding a slot, it passes to the next person in line. A patient who is already booked can't be removed — cancel the appointment instead, and that slot goes back into the queue like any other.

Angel refuses a slot that's already taken and a time that has already passed, so an offer the patient accepts is one they can actually keep.

When the clinic has no WhatsApp

Offers travel on WhatsApp, so a clinic without WhatsApp connected can't send them. Rather than hold a slot for someone who never heard about it, Angel leaves the entry Waiting and notifies the front desk to phone them. Everything else — the queue, the order, Book in — works exactly the same.

Patients joining themselves

With online booking on, the public booking page offers the waitlist when a patient can't find a time they want. They confirm their phone with a code, and the entry lands on the list marked self-joined. The desk sees them in the same queue as everyone added at the counter. That code needs WhatsApp connected, same as booking itself — without it the booking page shows "please call the clinic" and the waitlist stays a counter-side list.

Housekeeping

Entries don't pile up forever. An entry with a preferred date expires two weeks after that date; an open-ended one expires after three months. Both stay visible under the Expired filter.