Anesthesia call schedule template
The template we send new anesthesia groups.
Five tabs. Free .xlsx. The same structure we use with Trident Anesthesia before their schedule moves into our solver. Copy it into your own sheet or work from ours.
If your group is still building call in Excel or Google Sheets, the template needs to track more than dates and names. It needs room for requests, sites, call types, post-call recovery, and fairness counts that survive a hire or a vacation crunch.
Anesthesia call schedule template — .xlsx
Five tabs, no fake names, no add-ins. Open in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers.
Download the .xlsx
Why these five tabs
Most call spreadsheets fail because the rules and the calendar are in the same place.
A workable template separates inputs from the final calendar. That keeps the scheduler from burying critical rules inside cell colors, hidden columns, or notes nobody else can read.
Each tab below is a row in the .xlsx. Open the file as you read — or copy the column headers into a sheet you already have.
Clinicians — the roster you only update on hires and credential changes.
The people in your group, plus the fields the scheduler is already carrying around in their head: FTE, role, eligible sites, eligible call types, subspecialty, default no-call days. One row per clinician. You update this tab when someone joins, leaves, gets a new privilege, or changes their FTE — not every month.
Requests — everything the inbox used to hold.
Vacation, no-call days, conferences, preferences. One row per request. Status moves from requested to approved or declined before the calendar is built. The scheduler’s email stops being the system of record. When a partner asks “did my request get in?”, the answer is on this tab.
Coverage — demand before names.
The most overlooked tab. Before assigning people, write down what needs to be covered each day: site, call type, headcount, eligible roles. Saturdays look different from Wednesdays. Cardiac call at Site B is not the same as backup at Site C. Get the demand on paper first, and most of the “the schedule is wrong” arguments turn into “the inputs were wrong.”
Calendar — the final assignments, with a Lock column.
One row per date × site × call type, with the assigned clinician. The Locked column is the secret to keeping any later changes sane: when a partner-meeting decision needs to stay fixed, mark it locked, change the rest. If you ever move to solver-backed scheduling, this is the column the solver reads to know what not to touch.
Fairness — the column the group actually argues about.
Total call is not enough. Track weekends, holidays, first call, backup call, and post-call rest violations separately, with a running total carried forward from prior periods. Most call-schedule arguments are about whether the process was consistent, not about one assignment. This tab is your evidence.
When the template stops being enough
A spreadsheet can show that Dr. Lee has two weekends and Dr. Patel has three. It cannot tell you what happens if you fix it.
Moving one Saturday call usually creates three new problems: a post-call coverage hole on Monday, a site eligibility miss, and a worse holiday imbalance traced back to last December. Every “just swap” ends up taking the scheduler’s afternoon.
That is the point at which the template stops scaling. Not because the spreadsheet is bad — because the interactions between rules become the actual job. A solver can check thousands of combinations against your rules in a few seconds and tell you which assignments still work and which ones break something else.
The same five-tab structure feeds the solver. You will not throw the template away — you will stop being the one doing the combinatorial math.
Proof
Trident Anesthesia started here.
Trident is an eighteen-physician group covering seven hospitals: TMC, SMC, PEC, LOS, CSC, TSC, and SCC. One of the partners used to spend his nights and weekends building call. Since November 2025, every published Trident schedule has come through our solver — but the underlying template structure is the same five tabs you just downloaded.
The solver layered on top of that template handles contract employees getting their committed shifts first, partners absorbing the remainder, post-call cardiac requirements, partner pairings the group avoids on weekends, and a year-long vacation glide path so no one physician feels squeezed in December.
After the template
If a row in the template is making you write a paragraph in the Notes column, send it.
That paragraph is the rule a generic scheduling tool cannot model. It is also the rule we are best at modeling. Send it — not a demo request — and we will tell you directly whether it belongs in a Nice Schedule solver.