Roles

A role is a named set of permissions, such as “Front desk”, “Nurse” or “Lab technician”. Each staff member is given one or more roles, and can do whatever any of their roles allows. The Roles screen lists your organization’s roles and is where you create and change them.

Roles belong to your organization only. Other organizations on the platform have their own.

Your organization starts with a set of default roles: Administrator, Doctor, Nurse, Receptionist, Analytics and Lab Technician. They are ordinary roles, so you can change or delete them like any other. Nightingale support can see your roles but does not change them.

Between them, the default roles grant every permission except changing the quantities on your licence, which you grant explicitly. The Administrator is for the back office: your organization’s settings and licence, users, roles, tags, locations, integrations, automation and which care plans you offer, registering patients, and turning their monitoring on and off, so that the automation rules it writes can start monitoring. It does not open clinical records or enroll patients in care plans, so give an administrator who also cares for patients a clinical role as well. Doctors turn on monitoring and enroll patients in care plans; nurses see the patient’s care plans. Organizations created before a default role changed keep their roles as they were.

The list

Each row shows the role’s name, its description and how many permissions it grants. From a row’s menu you can:

• View the role and its permissions, and edit it if you are allowed to (see Role details).
• Duplicate role to start a new role from a copy of this one, which is the quickest way to make a variant.
• Delete the role. A role still assigned to anyone cannot be deleted. Remove it from those users first. Deleting is permanent.

Create, Duplicate role and Delete are only shown if you can manage roles.

Choose Create to start a role from scratch (see Creating a role).

How roles take effect

Changes to a role apply to everyone who holds it, the next time they do anything. There is no separate step to publish a change.

Assigning roles to people is done from their user record, not from this screen.

Who sees what

Viewing roles needs a role that allows it. Creating, changing and deleting roles needs the permission to manage roles.

Managing roles is an administrator’s permission. Whoever has it can give any role, including one they hold themselves, any permission, even ones they don’t have. In the same way, whoever can assign roles can give anyone in your organization, themselves included, any role. Give these permissions only to people you trust with full access to your organization.