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Visitation facilities

A visitation facility is an external place where multiple visitees live or stay — a nursing home, a hospital, an assisted-living community, a memory-care unit, or a hospice. By recording each facility once, you give every minister a single source for the address, the contact person, the visiting hours, and any standing arrangement (such as Mass in the chapel every Wednesday) — without retyping the same details for every resident.

The Facilities page​

Navigate to Admin Dashboard → Visitation → Facilities. The page shows a table of every facility your parish ministers visit, with an Add facility button on the right and search and status filters at the top.

What each row shows​

Each row gives you a quick summary:

  • Name of the facility — for example, "St. Joseph's Care Center."
  • Type — nursing home, assisted living, hospital, rehabilitation, memory care, hospice, or other.
  • Address and city.
  • Visitee count — how many visitees from your parish currently live there.
  • Assigned minister — the priest, deacon, or Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion who normally covers the facility.
  • Active/Inactive status.

Filtering the list​

  • Search — by name, address, or contact person.
  • Status — all, only active, or only inactive.

Facilities versus parish locations versus rooms​

Three concepts in Sacramentum sound similar but mean different things. Knowing the difference avoids confusion:

  • A parish location is a building your parish owns or operates, such as the main church, an adoration chapel, or the parish hall. Locations have Mass and confession schedules, and they appear on your public site. See Managing locations.
  • A facility room is a bookable space inside a parish location — a meeting room, a classroom, the parish hall — where parish events are held.
  • A visitation facility is an external building you do not own — a hospital, a nursing home, a care center — where visitees live or are receiving care.

Visitation facilities are external by definition. If your parish chaplain serves regular Mass at a Catholic care center your parish owns or co-operates, you may want both: a parish location (for the Mass schedule and public visibility) and a visitation facility (for the residents who are also visitees), linked together by the Linked location field described below.

Adding a facility​

  1. Click Add facility in the upper right.
  2. On the Details tab, enter the Name of the facility. This is the only required field.
  3. Pick the Type — nursing home, assisted living, hospital, rehabilitation, memory care, hospice, or other. The type controls the icon shown elsewhere in Sacramentum.
  4. Leave Active turned on so the facility shows up in dropdowns when you add visitees.
  5. Optionally choose a Linked location. If your parish already has this place set up as a parish location (for example, you celebrate Mass there), linking the two pulls the address from the location and keeps them in sync.
  6. Fill in the Address. The autocomplete suggests addresses as you type. Selecting a suggestion fills city, state, postal code, and the geographic coordinates needed for route planning.
  7. Add a Contact person, Contact phone, and Contact email — usually the activities director, the chaplain coordinator, or the front desk. Ministers will use this to call ahead.
  8. Note the Visiting hours in plain text — for example, "9am–8pm daily; closed during shift change 2–3pm."
  9. Add any Notes the minister should see when arriving (parking instructions, building entrance, sign-in process).
  10. Click Save.

The facility appears in the list immediately and is available in the At facility dropdown when you add or edit a visitee.

tip

You can add a facility before any of its residents are visitees. When the parish learns that a parishioner has moved to a nursing home, having the facility already on file makes adding them as a visitee a thirty-second job.

Group visit preferences​

A facility can have its own group-visit pattern that applies to several visitees at once — useful when, for example, a priest celebrates Mass in the chapel every other Wednesday at 10am for everyone at the facility, or a deacon brings Communion to the whole floor every Sunday afternoon.

On the Preferences tab of the facility form:

  1. Choose a Frequency — weekly, biweekly, monthly, or custom.
  2. Pick the Weekdays for the group visit.
  3. Choose a Time — an exact time, a window, or no specific time.
  4. Set the Approximate duration. The default for facilities is 60 minutes, longer than for individual home visits.
  5. Pick a Start date, and optionally an End date if the pattern is temporary.
  6. Click Save.

Visitees at the facility who do not have their own personal preference inherit the facility's pattern, so you do not have to fill out the same schedule again for each resident.

Assigning a minister to a facility​

The Assignment tab on the facility form lets you pick a default minister for the whole facility:

  1. On the facility form, switch to the Assignment tab.
  2. Choose a Minister from the dropdown.
  3. Pick the Role: priest or Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (EMHC).
  4. Add Notes if the minister needs special context (for example, "Bring extra hosts for memory-care wing").
  5. Click Save.

When you save a preference and an assignment together, Sacramentum generates visits onto the visitation calendar right away.

Bulk-assigning ministers across visitees​

When a new minister takes over a nursing home, you do not have to edit each visitee one by one:

  1. Open Visitation → Visitees and filter by the facility.
  2. Select all the rows.
  3. Click Reassign minister in the toolbar.
  4. Pick the new minister and confirm.

Or use the equivalent bulk action on the Facilities page: select one or more facilities and use Reassign minister to set the same default for everyone there.

Linking a facility to a parish location​

If your parish already maintains a parish location for the same place — perhaps your priest celebrates a regular Mass at the care center's chapel and that schedule needs to be public — link the two:

  1. Open the facility for editing.
  2. On the Details tab, find Linked location under the address section.
  3. Pick the parish location from the dropdown.
  4. Click Save.

Linking shares the address between the two records and surfaces the facility on the parish location's detail view. Mass and confession schedules created on the parish location continue to live there; the visitation facility continues to handle visitee assignments and group-visit preferences.

Archiving and deleting​

Facilities go through their own lifecycle. A nursing home may close. A hospital may stop being a regular visitation site after the parish chaplain retires.

  • Archive (recommended) — toggle the Active switch off. The facility stays in the database with all its history but no longer appears as a default option when you add a new visitee. Use the Inactive filter to find it again later.
  • Delete — click the actions menu on the row and choose Delete. This is permanent and removes the facility from your records. Sacramentum prevents deletion if active visitees are still linked to the facility — reassign or archive those visitees first.
warning

Deletion is irreversible. If you only want the facility out of the way of daily work, archive it instead. Archived facilities can be reactivated at any time; deleted facilities cannot.

What's next​

  • Visitation calendar — see the visits generated from each facility's group pattern
  • Route planning — pack a single afternoon's visits at one facility into one efficient stop