Automatic assignment

December 2025

Rota Masters are under increasing pressure to produce compliant, equitable rotas while accommodating varied working patterns, rising less-than-full-time contracts, and frequent changes to availability and leave. Traditionally, creating bespoke rotas has relied on manual processes, spreadsheets, and repeated iterations to balance service cover with individual agreements, making the task time-consuming and error-prone.

Automatic Assignment was created to solve this challenge, enabling departments to define their requirements once and generate optimised, compliant rotas automatically, while still retaining full control to review and refine the final outcome.

We are pleased to introduce Automatic Assignments, the latest addition to our growing suite of features designed to help Rota Masters streamline departmental rostering. Departments can now define their cover requirements, clinician availability and work priorities, then generate bespoke rotas at the click of a button.

As increasing numbers of clinicians work less-than-full-time arrangements, this feature enables departments to build rotas that reflect agreed working patterns while still meeting service demands. Automatic Assignment supports greater clinician autonomy and flexibility, aligning with the NHS 10 Point Plan to improve resident doctors’ working lives. By automatically balancing FTE, maintaining rota compliance, and distributing work equitably, Automatic Assignment significantly reduces the administrative burden of creating bespoke rotas – all while ensuring operational coverage and clinical safety.

Rotamap's automatic assignment

Rota Masters can:

  • Define shift requirements, including the optimal sequence shifts, corresponding rest days and priority level
  • Configure clinician availability, including FTE, non-working days, shift permissions and shift expectations
  • Ensure rotas are fully compliant by respecting the resident doctor compliance rules
  • Consider the impact of both approved and submitted leave
  • Rapidly preview the optimal solution that maximises demand cover
  • Modify the auto-generated rota to respond to specific requests or preferences
  • Share the final rotas with doctors for them to review, prior to publication

    • This workflow mitigates the need for separate spreadsheets, email chains and manual transcription. Instead, the process can be completed entirely on Medirota or CLWRota and fully integrated into the live rota.

    The Automatic Assignment feature will soon be available to all departments using CLWRota, or Medirota.

    If you have any questions or would lik eto start using the feature please email support@rotamap.net or call (+44) 020 7631 1555.

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