Video Transcript:

Welcome to this quick tutorial on how to activate and deactivate Protected Learning Time Periods on the cloud platform for NHS Surgeries and Medical Practices. What you will need to go to once you have signed in to the administrator login is go to ‘Call Groups’ and then ‘Hunt Group’. ‘Hunt Group’ is a feature we use to control scheduling and ad hoc call forwarding. What you’ll need to do is locate one that says ‘PLT Check’, and this may be abbreviated as ‘TC’ so ‘Time Control’. Once you’ve found that, click ‘Edit’ on the right-hand side. Once that’s opened up, you’ll then need to go to the furthest right-hand side tab called ‘Advanced Settings’ so click that. So we’re going to go through two methods.

Method One

The first method is to manually apply your PLT message and then manually deactivate it. We do this by using the ‘Call Forwarding’ feature. On the left-hand side you’ll see a status. If it’s green that means it’s currently active so at the moment we are following an automatic schedule. At the moment the call forward isn’t active. So, what we are actually doing is we are forwarding calls, so deviating away from the normal call routing and we’re going to force calls to go to a certain extension. This internal extension holds a message – the message will be the PLT message. So if we just have a quick look at this. If we click ‘Edit’ we see that the planned call forward is going to go to internal extension 706. So what I’m going to do, we’re going to activate that. So say it’s come to 12:30 and the PLTs have started, we will click ‘Activate’. Inbound calls from this point onwards, will now hit that message. If we’ve come to the end of the training, so the close of the business day, the close of surgery hours, and we want to deactivate that training message so that we want normal call routing to be applied, we need to click the ‘Activate’ button against the schedule. You need to have at least one call forwarding or schedule activated at any one time.

Method Two

So, this leads us on to method number two. Method number two is an automatic schedule. This means that you will be planning a PLT period in advance, you get to put a date in. So if you click ‘Edit’ on the right-hand side. If you scroll down you’ll still see this internal extension number 706. You’ll then see you get to have a drop down and apply a schedule. So this one’s called ‘PLT Closed’. If we click the pencil icon, and then go to ‘Events’ you’ll see at the moment we have a PLT date for May booked in. Let’s have a look at this. Click ‘Edit’ and you’ll see the 13th of May 2020 is currently applied. What we can do, is we can apply a further date or we can even delete this date, this is last year’s PLT. So what we’ll do is we’ll go to ‘Events’, we’re going to get rid of this PLT and delete it. We’re going to add a new one. So, we’re going to apply April the 12th. So here is your start and end dates, it comes up with a nice little calendar quite handy, so the 12th. It’s not going to be an all day event so untick that and this allows us to select a time, so our times are going to be 12:30 to 18:30. It won’t be recurring. We can give this a name, we’re going to call this ‘April 2021 PLT’ and then click ‘Create’. We could add further dates if we wanted to, but for this automatic schedule I don’t have to do anything, I have already pre-planned that on the 12th April between 12:30 and 18:30, a PLT period and message will be active. So, if I come out of that, and just click ‘Save’ at the bottom and it will tell me that all of the settings have been conducted successfully.

And there you go, two methods – one is to apply PLT manually and the other is to schedule.