Online booking

Most online booking is a form that emails the desk, and somebody then checks whether the time is actually free. Orla's booking page reads the same availability engine the clinic's own diary reads, so a time a patient is offered is a time that is genuinely open. Nothing is confirmed by hand afterwards because nothing needs to be.

What the engine actually checks

Before a slot appears on the page it has to survive all of this:

• The practitioner's real working hours, which differ by day, can change from a given date, and can be overridden for one date — closed for a bank holiday, or a one-off late clinic on a Thursday. Shifts that cross midnight are handled as one window rather than two half-days.
• The service's own duration, not a fixed slot length. A 20-minute review and a 60-minute initial assessment do not pretend to be the same shape.
• Buffers before and after. If a service needs ten minutes to reset the room, the engine reserves that time around the appointment, and it refuses a slot where the buffer would spill outside the working window.
• Everything already in the diary, including its buffers.
• Blocked time — leave, admin, lunch, a weekly supervision that repeats — and busy time synced from an external calendar. To the engine these are the same fact: an interval this person is not available in.
• Rooms and equipment. If a service needs a treatment room, a free room of that type must exist for the whole appointment, or the slot does not appear.
• Group capacity. For a class, bookings at the same start time share the slot until the class is full, and they share the room rather than each demanding their own.

The clinic's own rules, not ours

Every one of these is the clinic's setting, with a sensible default:

• Minimum notice before an appointment can be booked online.
• How far ahead the page will let anyone book.
• How long a slot is held while a patient finishes filling the form, so two people cannot complete the same slot.
• Cancellation and reschedule cut-offs, and the fees that apply after them.
• Whether patients may choose their practitioner, or are simply offered what is free.
• Whether prices and durations are shown on the page at all.

Timezones, done properly

All of the schedule arithmetic happens in the clinic's own timezone, and it is correct across daylight-saving changes. This sounds like a footnote until the clocks go back and a competitor's diary quietly shifts every appointment in the week by an hour. Orla stores instants and reasons in clinic-local terms; a Tuesday at 09:00 is a Tuesday at 09:00 on both sides of the change.

Deposits

A clinic can require a deposit on any service, or on first appointments only. The slot is not held until the deposit is paid, so a deposit is a commitment rather than an invoice to chase later.

The page belongs to the clinic

It carries the clinic's name, its colours and its own list of services, with an optional welcome message at the top. A patient books, gets a confirmation, and can manage the appointment afterwards from the patient portal — the same place their forms, documents and invoices live — without ever creating a password.

When there is nothing free

A booking page that says "no availability" and stops is a page that loses the patient to whoever answers their phone. If the clinic has it switched on, a patient who finds nothing that suits can join the waitlist from the same page: the service they want, the practitioner if they have a preference, the dates that work and whether they can do mornings or afternoons.

The moment somebody cancels a matching appointment, that entry is what waitlist auto-fill offers the slot to.