A template is a predefined set of sub-goals, plan items and milestones which are designed to achieve a specific goal.
Service plan templates give case workers instant access to best practices for a particular type of plan. They ensure a fair, consistent approach to service delivery.
The service plan template provides a flexible platform to help deal with legislative changes that may result in modifications to an agency's service plans. A template can be administered to contain new plan elements or modifications to existing plan elements. A tree structure is provided to create the template which allows an administrator to expand or collapse the service plan template to view higher or lower levels of the service plan template hierarchy.
Additional flexibility is also provided within a service plan template for plan items. The plan items included within a template can be configured to be mandatory indicating that they may not be removed from within a service plan. Whether or not approval is required for a plan item may also be overridden within a template. Approval criteria that have been defined for a plan item that is included in a template may be selected for use within the template and also modified as required, e.g. the use of an approval criterion within one template may have a lower priority than it does within another template.
In order for a template to be available to a case worker when creating a service plan, an organization must relate appropriate service plan templates with related service plan types. This ensures that only suitable templates are available when a service plan is created.