Standing column
This week in the office
The office week is fixed, not improvised. Each weekday carries its own work, so a practice knows which day its diary is rebuilt and which day its orders go out.
The strip sets out which day carries which work. Where scripting is available, the current weekday is flagged on both the strip and the list.
- MondayThe fortnight ahead is set out from the session templates, and every hold left over from Friday is either confirmed or released.
- TuesdayOrder day. Purchase orders are raised against the approved list, numbered, and sent before midday so the practice sees them the same morning.
- WednesdayRecords morning. New files are named and indexed, borrowed files are chased back to the shelf, and the loan sheet is signed off.
- ThursdayDelivery notes are matched line by line against the orders they belong to. Shortages are written up and queried with the supplier the same afternoon.
- FridayThe week is closed off: cancellations reconciled, Monday’s running order printed, the quarterly review sheet brought up to date.
- SaturdayNo desk cover. The office mailbox is read once, but no appointment is booked, moved or released.
- SundayNothing is handled. Messages wait in the mailbox until Monday.
Scope of the engagement
What sits on the desk
SV DIXON LTD is registered under SIC code 86101, hospital activities. The work carried on under that registration is administrative and contractual. The office keeps a diary accurate, keeps files findable, and keeps what was ordered reconciled against what arrived. It does no clinical work of any kind, employs no practitioners, and forms no view on anything a practitioner writes down.
Four things come across the desk. Each one is a document with a number on it, a place it is kept, and a named person at the practice who can change it.
The diary
A session template per room per weekday: opening time, closing time, appointment length, turnaround gap. The office builds the fortnight from those templates and holds the booking rules in writing, including who at the practice may lengthen a session and who may not.
Bookings arrive by telephone and by the practice’s own form. Each one is entered with a reference, the room, the time and the name on the appointment. Nothing else is recorded against it here.
The filing
A single naming rule, an index, a shelf or folder a file belongs to, and a loan sheet for anything taken off that shelf. The office tells the practice where a file is and who signed for it last; that is the whole of the answer it gives.
Review dates are arithmetic on the retention period the practice sets in writing. The office does not choose those periods.
The ordering
Orders are raised only against the practice’s approved supplier list, with a purchase order number the practice can trace. Delivery notes come back to the office, are matched line by line, and anything short or substituted is queried the same week.
Supplier statements are reconciled against the numbered orders. Queries are written, not telephoned, so there is a record on both sides.
The correspondence
One mailbox, read on weekday mornings and again before the desk closes. Anything that belongs to the practice is forwarded unopened where it arrived sealed, and logged with the date it came in and the date it went on.
Sheet one
Slot capacity sheet
Before a session template is agreed, the office works out how many appointments the session can actually hold. The arithmetic is deliberately plain: usable minutes are the end time less the start time; a slot costs the appointment length plus the turnaround gap that follows it; the number of slots is the usable minutes divided by that cost, rounded down; whatever will not divide is printed as minutes left over at the end of the session.
The sheet below is set to a worked example — a twenty-minute appointment with a five-minute turnaround, in a session running from 09:00 to 12:30. Change any of the four figures and the working is redone line by line.
8 appointments fit the 3 h 30 min session, with 10 minutes left over
- Usable minutes = 12:30 minus 09:00210 min
- Slot cost = 20 min appointment + 5 min turnaround25 min
- Slots = 210 ÷ 25, rounded down8
- Booked out = 8 × 25200 min
- Minutes left over at the end of the session10 min
A guide for diary planning only. The office checks the figure against the room rota and the session template before any slot is opened.
Appointment block Turnaround gap Minutes left over
Session 09:00 to 12:30, drawn to scale: 8 appointment blocks, 8 turnaround gaps, 10 minutes unassigned at the end.
Running order
The office day, hour by hour
The desk is staffed from 08:30 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. The hours below are the order the work is done in, and the column on the right names the document the work lands in, because a task with nowhere to be written down is a task that gets done twice.
| Hour | At the desk | Written down in |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30 | Mailbox read; overnight cancellations pulled out and listed before anything else is touched. | Cancellation list for the day |
| 09:00 | Released slots offered down the waiting order, oldest request first. | Diary, with the reference against each slot |
| 10:30 | Bookings taken by telephone entered; anything unclear left as a hold rather than guessed at. | Diary and hold sheet |
| 12:00 | Day’s work on the day’s documents stops; the afternoon belongs to the weekday task on the strip above. | — |
| 13:00 | Orders, records or delivery notes, depending on the weekday. | Order book, index or goods-in sheet |
| 16:00 | Queries written and sent; nothing is left to be remembered tomorrow. | Query log |
| 16:45 | Tomorrow’s running order printed and sent to the practice; holds still open are listed by reference. | Running order and open-hold list |
Division of duties
Who holds what
An administrative engagement goes wrong when both sides think the other one is holding something. The split below is written into the engagement letter before the first week, and neither column moves without a written change to it.
The office holds
- The diary, the session templates and the hold sheet.
- The file index, the naming rule and the loan sheet.
- Purchase orders, delivery notes and the goods-in sheet.
- The query log, and the dated record of what was sent where.
The practice keeps
- Every decision about what a session is for and who staffs it.
- The approved supplier list, and the authority to add to it.
- The retention periods its own filing rule sets.
- Anything a practitioner records, which never reaches this office.
Colophon
Registered particulars
- Registered name
- SV DIXON LTD
- Company number
- 17407553
- D-U-N-S number
- 235087154
- Incorporated
- 18 August 2026
- Jurisdiction
- England & Wales
- SIC code
- 86101, hospital activities — the registration under which this administrative and contract work is carried on
- Registered office
- 31 Glebelands Road, Sale, M33 6LH, United Kingdom
- Office email
- office@svdixon.space
Correspondence
Writing to the office
Write to office@svdixon.space. Put the practice name and, where there is one, the purchase order number or file reference in the subject line, because that is what the mailbox is sorted by.
Do not send records, images or attachments holding anyone’s details to that address. The office is given access to a practice’s own system under the engagement letter and works inside it; nothing of that kind is wanted by email, and anything that arrives that way is deleted and the sender told so.
Post reaches the registered office at 31 Glebelands Road, Sale, M33 6LH. Post is opened at the desk on weekday mornings only. What the office keeps, where it keeps it, and for how long is set out on the office and data page.