2021–ongoing
Placement allocation
A web app for spreading students across hospital sites without living in last year’s spreadsheet. Trusts confirm capacity, universities have preferences, academic years stack up, and somebody still has to email people when a site has not filled in this year’s numbers.
Allocating placements looks simple until the year changes. Students need sites. Sites can take a certain number of people. Trusts have to confirm that number. Universities do not all want the same places. A spreadsheet works, until you copy last year’s tab and something is quietly wrong.
The live version is PHP. What I kept bumping into was that a hospital and “how many people they can take in 25/26” are not the same thing. I had originally put both on one table, which is the spreadsheet mistake again. Google Sheets is still there as a master view, and email is there for chasing people who have not confirmed capacity.
There was an earlier Orthoptic-only version in 2021, smaller world, same problem. I think of that as the prototype. This page stays fairly vague because it is full of other people’s data.
The mashup
Hospital sites, how many students they can take this year, university preferences, and the spreadsheet that used to hold all of it.
AI-generated guess of the mashup mix, 1 to 5. Click a stat.
Hospitals 5/5: A site is a place. How many people they can take in 25/26 is a different thing.
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Notes to self for media to add
- Hero: a calendar grid of sites and weeks, not a stock ‘healthcare dashboard’. Fake site names only.
- Screenshots: allocation matrix with dummy data; a capacity confirmation screen; before/after of sites table vs site_capacity. No real trusts, students, or emails.
- Short demo: pick an academic year → see which sites have not confirmed capacity → pretend to send the nag email. Do not show production SMTP.
- YouTube Short: “We used to allocate placements in Excel. Then the year changed.”
- Privacy: this is the sensitive one. No live data, no student names, no trust emails, no GitHub, no connection strings.