Complicated Question

[Guest]

I was getting help from one of your gurus, but haven't heard from him lately.
Hope he is well.
My question is I have patients admitted to hospital to a designated floor.
Throughout their stay, they may be moved to another floor. I already have an
application, thanks to guru, that tracks their attendance to various
activities in a given month. My problem is, how to keep track if they move
from one floor to another and still maintain the history at any given time
during the month.
Everything is working fine except this one glitch.
On my form when I call up a certain floor, it will give me the listing of
all patients and their attendance. I need to be able to enter if they move
to another floor, then have someway to retrieve all attendance up to that
point on that given floor, then have them associated to the new floor and any
attendance from that point on retrieved.
Again, thanks to Ken, he was superb in getting this project up and
running, but I still have questions.
Help will be appreciated.

 

[Larry Daugherty]

It sounds like your schema (data design) may be incorrect for your
application.

Floor numbers and names might be kept in a separate lookup table (no
*lookup fields* please) with the various attributes of the floors
recorded therein.

If you have nursing stations or other points of communication you
would also track them as separate entities. The floor on which they
reside would be one of their attributes.

Patients are different entities from Floors entirely. Without knowing
much about your application, I would think that tracking Patients
would be of great interest - ergo Patients are a separate entity
deserving a table of its own. That you need patient visibility
independent of location is at the heart of your current issue. Their
current floor information is an attribute that should be updated as
the patient is relocated.

I realize that the above leaves you with things to research and learn.
If you require more detailed help then post back with one issue per
post and describe what you have already done in your attempts to solve
that issue.

A couple of great newsgroups for newbies are:

microsoft.public.access.gettingstarted
microsoft.public.access.tablesdesign

HTH