A one-page sheet for running a field day

When to use this

Use one sheet per site, team, or partner route, every day that site is live. It is the instrument that turns a plan written in a meeting room into a record of what a specific team actually did at a specific counter, ward, or pharmacy on a specific day. It belongs in Phase 4 of the 5-Phase Commercial Turnaround Framework, and it is the difference between an activation that survives to a second week and one that quietly stops without anyone deciding to stop it.

It is not a clinical record and not a substitute for one. Keep patient-level information off this sheet unless a documented, approved process specifically requires it on this form — use a referral or transaction ID instead. If a site needs help deciding what belongs here versus in a clinical system, that decision belongs to the Healthcare Commercial Data Boundary Guide, not to whoever is filling in the sheet that morning.

Activation details

Complete once, at the start of the activation period.

Start-of-day readiness

Complete during the morning huddle, before the first customer or patient interaction. A "no" here means the sheet is doing its job. What fails the sheet is a "yes" nobody actually checked.

Live activity log

Record counts and IDs, not clinical detail. Anyone reading this log later should be able to trace a number back to a specific transaction without needing to know anything about the patient behind it.

Exception and escalation log

Every exception gets its own row, its own category, and a name against it — a shared "issues" column that nobody owns is where problems go to be forgotten.

End-of-day reconciliation

This is the section that catches the gap between what the activity log says happened and what the stock room, the till, or the payment system says happened. The two should match. When they don't, that variance is the day's real finding, not the raw activity count.

Site lead sign-off: ____________________ Partner lead sign-off: ____________________ Date/time: __________

Both signatures matter. A sheet signed only by the site lead is a site's opinion of its own day; a sheet signed by both sides is a shared record neither party can later dispute.

Next-day handover

Write only what tomorrow's team needs to act on — open IDs, stock or capacity constraints, promised callbacks, payment exceptions, and any quality or safety escalation still live. "Follow up" is an unassigned item, not a closed one. Name the person, the action, and the time it is due, or the item will still be open a week later with nobody able to say why.

How to read the sheet, and where it goes wrong

A single day's sheet tells you almost nothing on its own — the value is in the pattern across a week or two, where a recurring exception category or a recurring variance at end-of-day reconciliation points at a structural problem rather than a bad day. Read a run of sheets before drawing a conclusion from one.

The tool fails in two predictable ways. The first is staff filling in the readiness check retrospectively at close, marking everything "yes" because the day went fine anyway — which defeats the entire purpose of a check meant to prevent a bad day before it starts, not describe one after it. The second is treating the exception log as a place to record blame rather than containment; an exception row that says "partner didn't restock" with no containment action is a complaint, not a control. Both failure modes are usually visible from the handwriting alone — filled in all at once, in one pen, at the end of the day, rather than across the day as things actually happened.

Worked walkthrough

Take a generic diagnostics company running a sample-collection activation across twelve pharmacy partners in Ikeja. One partner site's sheet for a Tuesday shows a readiness check with "service capacity or stock confirmed" marked no, escalated to the site lead at 8:40am with the note "test kits short by an estimated fifteen units, courier requested." The live activity log shows eleven enquiries in the morning block against a target of eighteen for the day, with three of those enquiries logged as "delivered: no — kit unavailable" rather than silently dropped. The exception log carries that stock shortage as its own row, category "stock," containment "redirected two enquiries to nearest sister pharmacy 400m away," escalated to the partnership lead, closed at 1:15pm when the courier restock lands.

End-of-day reconciliation shows fourteen orders created against eleven delivered, a variance of three, all three tied directly back to the morning stock exception rather than left as an unexplained gap. The handover note for the next team reads: "kit stock now at full count as of 1pm restock; two enquiries redirected to sister pharmacy may call back for a scheduled slot — confirm before Thursday." That is a sheet doing its job: the shortfall is visible, contained, attributed to a cause, and handed off as a specific, ownable action rather than absorbed into a vague sense that Tuesday was a slow day.

If your field teams are producing activity without a record anyone can reconcile, contact Dr Tolu Ajidahun to adapt this sheet to your operating model.