dhis2-users team mailing list archive

[Ola Hodne Titlestad <olati@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I would suggest to capture service availability and stock-outs as separate
data elements or even orgunit groups for services, and not as some
interpretation of a 0. Then there is no need to capture zeros.
Once the data is aggregated up one level all this zero/blank interpretation
is impossible anyway. The complete button also gives an indication of
wheter data is missing of not.
Ola
On Jan 11, 2012 9:45 AM, "Knut Staring" <knutst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Here in India, the activities of  Subcenters differ quite a bit in the
> particular services they offer. Therefore, since all use a standard format,
> there will almost always be a number of fields that are not applicable.
> Because of this, they maintain that 0 is signficant, because it means "Have
> the service, but no cases this month", whereas a blank field means "Don't
> have the service" in other words N/A.
>
> Sometimes it can even mean something in-between, like "We normally
> distribute Iron tablets, but sometimes we don't have them (blank), and
> sometimes we have them but there is no demand (0)". In my view the latter
> semantics is quite complicated, and hard to get consistent, but I'm being
> told the health workers handle it well. Thus, a typical report can consist
> of 50 positive integers, 7 blanks and 20 zeros.
>
> Since data entry on the mobile is quite cumbersome and zeros also tend to
> fill up the database, I would have preferred zeros to be non-significant
> and just go with blanks. But then we would lose the above distinction.
>
> Knut
>
>
> --
> Knut Staring
> Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo
> +4791880522
> http://dhis2.org
>
>
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