A video consultation works like any other appointment in your list. The patient books a video slot, it appears in your day alongside your walk-in patients, and you open it from the same screen. This guide covers when the call opens, how to start and end it, and what happens if the patient never turns up.
Finding the appointment
Video consultations appear in your normal appointment list with a badge marking them as video. You do not need a separate screen or a separate app.
When the call is available, a Start consultation button appears on that appointment's row. If you do not see the button, one of these is true:
- It is not yet 15 minutes before the appointment time, or more than 40 minutes after it.
- The appointment is not confirmed — for example the payment is incomplete, or it was cancelled.
- The appointment is not a video slot.
When the call is open
The room opens 15 minutes before the scheduled time and closes 40 minutes after it. A 4:00 pm consultation is joinable from 3:45 pm to 4:40 pm.
Opening a few minutes early is worth doing. It gives your browser time to ask for camera and microphone permission before the patient is watching.
Starting the consultation
Press Start consultation. The video opens inside the Treatlly page — it does not launch a separate app or a new tab, so your patient's details and your prescription pad stay where they are.
Around the video the page shows your name, qualification and registration number. That is deliberate: the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines require the patient to be able to identify the registered practitioner they are speaking to, and keeping it on screen satisfies that during the call rather than only before it.
Your camera and microphone are only requested after you press Start, so simply opening the page never switches your camera on.
If the patient has not joined yet
Stay in the room. You are notified when your patient joins, so you do not have to watch the screen.
If the patient joined and dropped out, they can come back in using the same link — a dropped call does not lock them out, as long as the window is still open.
Ending the consultation
When you are finished, press End consultation. This matters more than it looks.
Ending properly closes the room, records the correct finish time against the appointment, and attributes the end to you in the clinical timeline. If nobody presses End, the session is left open and is closed automatically much later by a system sweep — which records the end as "System" rather than as you, and delays the appointment's bookkeeping.
If you navigate away with a call running, your browser asks you to confirm. That prompt exists for exactly this reason. Use End consultation instead of closing the tab.
If the patient dropped out and you expect them back, you can stay in the room. Ending is what closes it.
If the patient never attends
If the patient does not join at all, end the consultation as normal. The appointment records that the patient did not attend, and your clinic's cancellation and refund terms apply as they would for a missed walk-in.
Writing the prescription
Prescribing works the same as an in-person visit, with one clinical difference worth knowing: for video consultations, certain drug classes cannot be prescribed and will block signing. This follows the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, not a Treatlly rule.
See Writing and signing prescriptions for the full signing checklist, including the requirement to have your signature uploaded before you can sign anything.
If something does not work
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
| The video call opens 15 minutes before and closes 40 minutes after the scheduled time. | You are outside the window. Check the appointment time. |
| This appointment isn't confirmed. | The booking is unconfirmed or cancelled. The front desk can check the payment status. |
| Patient consent is required before joining the video call. | The patient has not yet accepted the video-consultation agreement. They are prompted on their own screen; ask them to accept and rejoin. |
| The video call is temporarily unavailable. Please try again shortly. | A temporary problem reaching the video service. Wait a moment and press Start again. If it persists, tell your clinic admin. |
| This consultation has already ended. | The session was closed. Start a fresh appointment if the patient still needs to be seen. |
| Video consultation is not enabled for this clinic. | Video consultation is switched off for your clinic. Your clinic admin controls this. |
If the patient cannot hear you, it is nearly always browser permissions at one end. Reload, press Start, and choose Allow when prompted.