How many tokens should a channelling session have?
For channelling centres and clinics with visiting doctors. , 6 minute read.
Open too few tokens and patients are turned away from a session that ends early. Open too many and the last patients sit in the waiting room long after the doctor wanted to leave. The right number comes from three things you already know.
Start with the minutes the doctor really has
Take the session from the time the doctor usually starts seeing patients, not the time printed on the board, to the time they need to leave. A session advertised as 5:00 to 8:00 pm where the doctor arrives at 5:15 and leaves at 8:00 has 165 minutes, not 180.
If the doctor takes a tea break or does a ward round in the middle, take that out too.
Measure the average consultation, do not guess it
Most doctors underestimate how long they spend with each patient, because they remember the quick visits. Over a week, note the time each session started and ended and how many patients were seen. Divide the minutes by the patients.
Different doctors in the same centre can be very different. A paediatrician with anxious parents and a dermatologist reviewing a repeat prescription do not need the same number.
Allow for patients who do not come
Some booked patients never arrive. Your own past sessions tell you how many: count the bookings that were never called over a few weeks and work out the share. Even a rough figure is better than none.
The share is usually higher for bookings made days in advance than for bookings made the same day, and lower when patients get a reminder on the day.
Put it together
Divide the doctor’s minutes by the average consultation to get the number of patients they can see. Then add back the ones you expect not to come.
- Doctor’s real time: 5:15 pm to 8:00 pm = 165 minutes
- Average consultation: 7 minutes
- Patients the doctor can see: 165 ÷ 7 = 23
- Usual no-shows: about 1 in 10
- Tokens to open: 23 ÷ 0.9 = 25
Round down rather than up. A session that ends ten minutes early annoys nobody; one that runs forty minutes late annoys everyone, and the doctor most of all.
Review it every month
The number is not fixed. Check it again when a doctor changes their hours, when a new doctor joins, and in the months when fever cases fill every session. If a session regularly runs late, lower it by two or three tokens. If it regularly finishes early with patients turned away, raise it.
In MyClinic each session has its own maximum tokens and average minutes per patient. The average is what the approximate times on your booking page and in the confirmation SMS are worked out from, so a realistic figure also means patients arrive at a sensible time.