Practice Handbook

The Practice Handbook is your surgery’s internal knowledge base — a single, always-accessible place for staff to find rotas, policies, procedures, contact lists, and operational guidance. It stores how your surgery runs: who is on call today, what to do with a discharge letter, how repeat prescriptions are handled. It complements the Signposting Library (which focuses on where to direct patients) by covering everything about how the practice itself operates.

The Handbook is accessible from the main navigation and is always one click away, regardless of which module staff are in.

The Staff View

Main page layout

When a staff member opens the Handbook they see:

A categories sidebar on the left showing all visible categories. Clicking a category loads its items in the main area.
A main content area showing the selected category’s items as cards, each displaying the item title, type, and a brief summary.
Quick Access buttons near the top of the page — configurable shortcuts to frequently used items such as “Today’s rota” or “Phone Numbers”.
An operational info panel at the bottom of the page showing the current on-take GP and other configurable operational information (see Pinned panel below). This panel defaults to collapsed; it auto-expands when the on-take GP changes, and remembers each user’s preference.

Quick Access buttons

Quick Access buttons appear at the top of the staff page and provide direct shortcuts to specific Handbook items. They are especially useful for the things staff reach for every day. Each button shows the item’s title by default, but can have a custom label. Buttons support custom background and text colours — useful for making high-priority shortcuts stand out. Buttons are configured and reordered by admins in Structure & Settings (see below).

Item types

The Handbook supports two item types: PAGE and LIST.

PAGE items

PAGE is the standard item type for narrative guidance content — policies, procedures, clinical protocols, and contact information structured by role. A PAGE item contains:

A title
Optional Intro text shown above the role cards, providing a summary or context for the policy
One or more Role Cards — sections of guidance targeted at specific roles (e.g. Receptionist, HCA, Nurse, GP)
Optional Additional notes below the role cards for links, exceptions, or caveats

PAGE items are the right choice for most guidance content: anything that needs explanation, role-specific steps, or structured narrative.

Adding images to handbook pages

Anyone who can edit a handbook page — admins, or standard users with per-item editing permission — can add images to the Intro text and Additional notes sections. Click the image button in the editor toolbar, choose a JPG or PNG file up to 2MB, and optionally add alt text describing the image for screen readers (leave it blank if the image is purely decorative). The image is inserted where your cursor is and appears immediately.

Good uses include floor plans, annotated screenshots of practice systems, equipment photos, and process diagrams. A few things worth knowing:

Images are private to your practice: they are only served to signed-in members of your surgery, and images on a page in a restricted category follow that category’s visibility rules.
Images scale down automatically to fit the page (and the reader’s screen).
Anyone reading the page can click an image to view it full-screen, then zoom in and drag to move around — useful when a floor plan or annotated screenshot is too detailed to read at page size. Press Esc, click the background, or use the close button to return to the page.

Attachments and PDF documents

Every handbook item has an Attachments section where anyone who can edit the item can attach supporting documents in two ways:

Link — paste a URL to a document that lives elsewhere (a shared drive folder, an intranet page, a Word document).
Upload PDF — upload a PDF file up to 4MB directly into the handbook. The document is stored with your practice’s handbook content and opens in the browser’s built-in PDF viewer.

Uploaded PDFs are private to your practice, just like images: they are only served to signed-in members of your surgery, and documents attached to a page in a restricted category follow that category’s visibility rules. Link attachments, by contrast, point wherever the URL goes — access to those is controlled by the destination, not by the toolkit.

You can also link to an uploaded PDF from within a page’s Intro text or Additional notes: upload it as an attachment first, copy its address (right-click the “Uploaded PDF” link and copy the link address), then use the link button in the editor toolbar and paste it in.

LIST items

A LIST is a simple editable table for structured data that changes regularly and doesn’t require narrative explanation. Good examples: the duty rota, on-call contact numbers, frequently called departments, or a list of local service referral criteria.

Standard users with editing permission can update LIST items directly from the staff view, without accessing the admin dashboard. This makes it practical for the rota, for example, to be maintained by a non-admin staff member.

Smart visuals

Smart visuals turn a Handbook item into a polished, infographic-style view — contact cards, numbered process steps, checklists, team and buddy-group cards with working-day chips, role cards, key-fact tiles and warning callouts — rendered as normal app content, so the text stays selectable, accessible and readable on any screen size. Generating visuals is controlled by the ai_handbook_visuals feature flag (contact us to enable it); system administrators always have access, so they can try the feature on any practice before it is switched on. A visual that has been saved is visible to all staff regardless of the flag.

Generating a visual

Anyone who can edit an item (admins, or standard users with per-item editing permission) will see a Generate smart visual button when viewing it. Clicking it sends the item’s content to the AI, which chooses the most suitable visual treatments from a fixed set of layouts — it cannot invent free-form designs, colours or images, and it is instructed to use only facts present in the page.

The result appears as a clearly marked preview: nothing is saved until you review it and click Save visual. While previewing you can:

Reorder or remove sections using the controls on each section (a visual always keeps at least one section)
Refine with guidance — type a short instruction such as “group by site” or “make the warning more prominent” and regenerate; the AI applies your steer within the same fixed layout rules. Guidance shapes the structure — text styling is applied automatically by the app (phone numbers, for example, are always shown bold and tappable to dial)
Regenerate for a fresh arrangement, or discard the preview entirely

When you regenerate an existing visual, the AI is shown the previous layout and asked to keep the same structure wherever the updated content still supports it — so small content edits don’t reshuffle the whole visual.

What staff see

Once a visual is saved, everyone viewing the item — staff, editors and admins alike — gets a Standard / Smart visual toggle and can switch between the two views at any time. The visual opens by default while it is up to date, and the standard view (including inline editing of LIST rows for those with permission) is always one click away.

A Print visual button prints just the visual (with the page title), formatted for paper — handy for pinning a rota or buddy-system sheet up at the desk.

The page content stays the source of truth

A smart visual is a presentation of the page — the normal page content remains the single source of truth, and editing an item never changes its visual (or vice versa). If the underlying content is edited after a visual was generated, the visual is automatically hidden from everyone — staff simply see the standard view again — until an editor regenerates it. Editors viewing the item see a notice explaining that the visual is hidden, with a one-click regenerate, and are prompted to regenerate immediately after saving an edit to a page that has a visual. This guarantees an outdated visual can never be shown alongside newer page content. Saving and removing visuals is recorded in the audit trail.

Admin: Handbook Library

Admins access the Handbook via Manage handbook → Handbook Library.

The admin area has four tabs: Handbook Library, Structure & Settings, Engagement, and Audit.

The Handbook Library tab is the main content management area. It shows all handbook items in a searchable, filterable list grouped by category. A split-panel layout presents the item picker on the left and the editor on the right. From here, admins can:

Create a new PAGE or LIST item using the new-item form in the editor panel
Edit any existing item by searching or browsing the left-hand picker and selecting it
Set per-item editing permissions — individual items can be marked as editable by standard users, allowing specific people (for example, a receptionist maintaining the rota) to update that item without accessing the full admin dashboard

When creating a PAGE item, the editor includes:

Type — PAGE (guidance) or LIST
Title
Category — assign to a category from a dropdown
Warning badge (optional) — a short label such as “Urgent” displayed on the item card in the staff view
Last reviewed (optional) — a date field to support clinical governance review processes and signal to staff when content was last checked

Page content and additional notes are written in the rich-text editor, which supports section headings, bold, italic, underline, NHS-palette text colours, background highlights, bullet and numbered lists, and links (web addresses and e-mail). Content pasted from Word or Google Docs is cleaned up automatically.

Admin: Structure & Settings

The Structure & Settings tab is the configuration hub for the Handbook. It is laid out as a settings dashboard with section navigation on the left. Sections include: Categories, Quick access buttons, Pinned panel, and On-take rota (weekly).

Quick access buttons

Configure which items appear as Quick Access buttons on the staff front page. Uses a searchable item picker. Each button supports a custom label, custom background colour, and custom text colour, with a live preview showing how the button will appear to staff. Buttons are reorderable from this panel.

Pinned panel

The Pinned panel is the operational info section at the bottom of the staff page. It is configured here with structured fields. Examples of configurable fields include:

Task buddy system — e.g. short steps for staff including who covers who during the session
Post route — e.g. what to do after the call

The panel includes a live preview so admins can see how content will appear to staff before saving.

On-take rota (weekly)

The on-take rota is a separate settings section that allows admins to record the on-take GP for each week (Monday to Sunday). The current week’s on-take GP is surfaced automatically in the Pinned panel on the staff page. Admins can view and set upcoming weeks in advance.

Engagement

The Engagement tab shows which Handbook items are most viewed and which staff members are most active. Results are filterable by time period: 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or all time.

Engagement data helps admins understand whether new content is being found and whether frequently-needed items are surfaced prominently. If an important item shows low engagement, it may be worth adding a Quick Access button or checking its category placement.

Audit trail

The Audit tab shows a chronological feed of changes to the Handbook: who changed what, and when. It is filterable by time period and change type.

The audit trail supports governance review and helps diagnose unexpected changes. Because Handbook changes take effect immediately for all staff (there is no draft/approval workflow as there is in the Symptom Library), the audit tab provides the key accountability record.

Per-item editing permissions mean that specific items (typically operational lists such as rotas) can be maintained by standard users without admin access — the audit trail records these changes too.

Symptom Library — The main care navigation and patient signposting tool
Workflow Guidance — Step-by-step process workflows for clinical and administrative tasks; where the Handbook stores static policies, Workflow Guidance handles structured decision-making processes
Analytics — Surgery-wide engagement analytics across all modules
Clinical Governance — How the Symptom Library’s clinician review workflow operates
Admin Guide — Managing users, roles, and surgery-level settings

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