The Diary Card Input Screen
The main method used to monitor compliance with the New Deal involves the use of diary cards to record details of actual work over a sample period.
This screen controls the entry and analysis of diary cards. To get to this screen, a work group must have been defined with at least one doctor in it and with a diary card study commencement date.
The actual entry and update of diary cards is described in Diary Card Entry and Update
The screen shows all the diary cards that have been entered for this work group. The toolbar controls the display, analysis and update of the diary card data.
Toolbar Buttons
View
A pull down list gives the option to display a table of all diary cards for the work group, or only the cards with the activity defined as "Day with out of hours work". Select by clicking on the required option.
Delete
This button will delete the currently selected diary card. It is possible to delete a number of diary cards at once with this button. Select the first card to be deleted by clicking on the rightmost column of the table (the record selector column). Then use SHIFT+Left Click to select a range of cards, or repeated CRTL+Left Click to select a number of individual cards. The delete button will then delete all selected cards.
Fill
The system cannot calculate the average duty and work hours for the group unless a full set of diary cards is provided. This is because the system would have to guess the content of the missing days and could provide highly inaccurate figures. It is left to the user to fill in any missing cards with "best estimates". The "Fill" button can help by automatically filling any gaps in on of two ways:
Fill in missing cards from the work pattern. To use this, a work pattern must have been defined for the group, and the week in the pattern being worked by each doctor at the start of the diary card study must have been defined. See The Group Information Input Screen for where the week being worked is input. Any missing cards will then be replaced by the duty that should have been worked according to the theoretical pattern. Warning: this can result in serious inaccuracies if the wrong week in the pattern is selected or if duties have been swopped.
Fill in missing diary cards with days with no duties. This assumes that the probable reason that no card was supplied was because the doctor was on leave. Leave days are not counted when calculating average duty and work hours.
Full Shift
This button allows spreadsheet style input of diary cards for the current selected doctor (in the input box labeled "Doctor"). This facility is only available for full shifts where a record of work episodes is not appropriate. Full shifts are assumed to involve almost continuous work.
All the days of the study are presented. The duty code column allows selection of the activity type for the day by entry of a code.
S - Standard day
L - Leave day
0 - Zero hours work or rest day (code is a numeric zero)
1 – Study leave day (code is a numeric one)
? - If duty codes have been defined in the "work pattern" section of DRS they will be available for selection
When a code is entered and the cursor is moved off the cell (Enter/Tab pressed etc), the start and end times will be updated if appropriate. If "0" or "L" or "1" were selected, they will both be set to zero. If "S" or a duty code was selected and the start and end times were both zero, then the standard start and end times will be filled in. This is done to save data entry time if the doctor did work the standard hours. The start and end times, of course, should be changed if this was not the case.
The fields can be completed by mouse entry alone, by keyboard entry alone, or a combination of the two. The keys "Enter" and "Tab" will move to the next field in the table. "Shift" + "Tab" will move back a field and cursor keys will allow movement in all directions. The spacebar can be used like a mouse click on the tick boxes.
Check the "Real Card" box if diary card details have been entered for that day rather than assumed values used.
When complete click "Save and Exit" to store the changes made. To avoid storing any changes, close the window by clicking on the x in the top right corner. Entries with no duty code and start and end times at zero will not be stored as diary cards.
TMS
This button allows the user to load monitoring data from a TMS barcode reader file. A screen is displayed to allow the selection of file to import.
The doctor names used in DRS must be exactly the same as those used in TMS. If there is no name match in DRS for a doctor in the TMS file, a new doctor will be added to the diary card group. If this method of data collection is being used, it is probably best to allow the import process to add the doctor names to the work group.
OMR
This button allows input of diary card data from an Optical Mark Reader.
The OMR reader must be connected to the computer via the serial port specified on The DRS System Configuration Screen and turned on.
Click the "Prepare OMR to read cards" button. If a message box appears indicating that the OMR reader is not responding, either the wrong port has been selected or there is a fault with the OMR reader.
From the pull down list, select the doctor for the current batch of OMR cards. Feed the first card into the OMR reader.
If the card is read correctly and produces valid results, the results will be stored, displayed on the screen and the OMR reader will be ready for the next card. If an error is found, no data will be stored and an error box will be displayed with details. On closing this error box, the data read from the card will be displayed on the screen and it will be possible to correct it. The "Store Changes" button enables the modified data to be stored.
When all the cards for the doctor have been processed, select the next doctor and continue to feed cards.
PDA
This button allows the user to load monitoring data from a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant, otherwise known as a Pocket PC) that is using the DRS PDA software.
The PDA must be connected to the PC running DRS and the Microsoft "Active Sync" program must be running. (this usually starts automatically when the PDA is connected to the PC).
· Select the name of the user of the PDA from the pull down list.
· Click the PDA button
· DRS will check that appropriate data is on the PDA and report errors if it is not. If the owner name on the PDA does not match the doctor surname selected, a warning message will appear.
· If any days recorded on the PDA are outside the monitoring period defined for the diary card study, an error message will be displayed.
· The number of days of data loaded from the PDA will be reported.
The data loaded into DRS can be changed and analysed as though it had been entered manually.
Grp Info
This button gives immediate access to The Group Information Input Screen
This is useful to change items such as:
· Monitoring start date
· Doctor names
· Activity analysis recording (and category file to use)
· Record work episodes for all days (not just on call)
Analysis
This produces an analysis report for the current group. For more details see The Analysis Report
Blanks
DRS can be used to print blank data capture forms (diary cards) - details in Print blank diary cards with DRS
Missing
This button produces a report for the current diary card study that show a list of doctors/days for which no information has been enetered.
Dates
This button produces a report for the current work group that shows a list of all the diary card studies in the database for that group.
To view details of an old study, use the group input screen and select the study required from the pull down list of study dates.
