Questions before the form
Ask a few questions up front and send each person down the right route — or tell them to ring you instead.
Some people should never reach your booking form. Someone arranging an appointment for their mother, a fifteen-year-old, a person who needs a service you do not offer online — every one of them can spend five minutes picking a date before anything tells them so. Routing questions ask first, then send them where they should have gone.
Screening questions belong to a service and decide whether a booking is suitable — see Screening questions and eligibility. Routing questions come before all of that and only choose a route. Keep clinical questions in screening, where a nurse sees the answers against the appointment.
Where to set them up
Booked → Booking Form → Routing. Turn on Ask routing questions, then add your questions underneath.
Let AI write them for you
The hard part is the branching — you have to hold the whole thing in your head before you can write the first question. So describe it in a sentence instead. At the top of the Routing tab, click Let AI build this for you and say what should happen:
"Anyone booking for someone else should ring us instead. Under 18s can't book online. If it's for travel, send them straight to the travel health consultation."
It knows your services, so name them. It writes the questions, the answers and the routes, and drops them into the builder for you to read. Nothing is saved until you press Save — so change the wording, fix a route, delete a question you did not want. It can only ever route to services you actually have; if it suggests something you do not offer, that answer quietly becomes "carry on booking" instead.
What an answer can do
| Route | What happens | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Carry on booking | Straight into the normal form. | Most answers. This is the ordinary path. |
| Go straight to a service | Skips the menu, starts them on that appointment. | "It's for travel" → travel health consultation. |
| Go to a category | Narrows the menu to one group. | "It's a vaccination" → your vaccinations. |
| Stop and show a message | They cannot book. You write what they should do instead. | Under 18s, third-party bookings, anything needing a phone call. |
| Send them to a link | Off to another page. | An NHS service, a form, another site. |
Questions are asked in order and the first answer that is not "carry on" wins. Put your broadest question first — "is this for you?" before "what is it for?" — or a later question will never be reached.
Writing a stop that helps
A stop screen is the one place someone is told no. Give them somewhere to go.
| Instead of | Write | |
|---|---|---|
| Heading | "Not eligible" | "Let's get you booked another way" |
| Message | "You cannot book this online." | "We book under-18s over the phone so we can check a few things first. Give us a ring on 01234 567890 and we'll sort it." |
| Button | — | "Call the pharmacy" → tel:01234567890 |
Every stop screen also offers Change my answers, so a mis-tap is not a dead end.
Choosing which pages ask
Turning routing on does not put it on every form. Each place you have embedded a booking form decides for itself, with a prequal setting on the shortcode:
| Shortcode | Asks? |
|---|---|
[get_booked] | Follows the setting in Booking Form → Routing. |
[get_booked prequal="on"] | Always asks, even if routing is off everywhere else. |
[get_booked prequal="off"] | Never asks, even if routing is on. |
It works the same on [get_booked_compact], [get_booked_short] and [get_booked_button]. So your travel clinic page can ask three questions while your flu-jab page goes straight to the calendar.
Seeing the answers later
Every answer is saved against the booking. Open it and look under Questions & secure documents — the routing answers sit above the appointment questions, marked Answered before booking. They tell you which route the person took, which is often why they turned up expecting something slightly different.
A word on wording
A set of health-sounding questions reads as a judgement about the person unless you tell them otherwise. The shipped line under the heading says "These questions only guide the booking route. They do not assess or approve care." Keep something like it. It costs one sentence and it stops people believing they have been turned down for treatment when they have only been pointed at a phone number.
Keep it short, too. Three questions is usually plenty; past five, people give up — and someone who gives up on question six never becomes a booking at all.