"John W. Vinson" wrote:


Why is there a ClinicID field in the Child table, though? A clinic is not an
attribute of a person; could not the same child be seen at multiple clinics?
Your ClinicVisits table should (I would expect) have a single field
relationship to a table of Clinics (where did this visit occur) and,
separately, a relationship to a table of Children (who visited).
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]



Actually, no, the child will not be seen in more than one clinic. I'm
developing the database for Project Peanut Butter, a small
humanitarian/medical organization that is working and doing research in
Malawi, Africa. They treat starving children in villages that are far flung;
the families are too poor to own bicycles, much less automobiles. The staff
goes every two weeks to each site and sees the children at the clinic that is
nearest to the child's village.

The researchers had set up a child id convention that consists of two
letters and three digits. My concern is that the data entry person fat
fingers the letters and enters MU instead of MY, for example. (The excel
formulas that they've built to filter data by clinic just use the first two
characters of the child id.) Using the convention they were, it would be
easy for a record to be lost for all intents and purposes by having a typo in
those first two characters. I wanted to break the clinic out to a separate
validatable (is that a word?) field so I could prevent that from happening.

Am I barking up the wrong tree?
--
Ann Scharpf