Definition
Data Item Title (exact and case-sensitive)
Canonical definition
This definition should be as descriptive and prescriptive as possible. Try to
make the definition concise and avoid vague terms like “should” or “can be”.
Reason required
Use this field to specify what the data held is being held for. It may be that the
information is needed for day-to-day deanery business, for national reporting
requirements, for employment and HR purposes or to fulfil statutory obligations.
Please list all that apply:
Required for
- Day-to-day deanery business
- Gold Guide / Orange Book
- National reporting requirement
- Statutory obligation
- Local reporting requirement
- Workforce planning
- HR or employment
- Other reason (please specify)
Which training group is this data item stored for?
Mandatory
- Foundation
- Specialty
- Primary care
- Dentists
- Public health
- AHPs
- Trainers
- Programme Directors
- Deanery staff
Yes / No
Data type
Mandatory fields are
required to comply with
legislation or deanery
minimum data sets.
Field length
Characters / File Size
Each data item may be
specifically limited to a
particular field length; for
example a date format of
“dd/mm/yyyy” would be
10 characters. For
binary field types, a file
size should be specified
appropriately by
kilobytes, megabytes or
gigabytes.
Alpha, Alphanumeric, numeric,
date, binary, data
To specify what type of data can
be held; for example, a numerical
field should only be able to store
numerical values.
Min / Max
occurrences
Dependent on data item
Some data items may have zero,
one or many occurrences; for
example the data item “Date of
birth” for a trainee may be
Min: Zero
Max: One
“Programme start date” for a
trainee
Min: One
Max: 10 (notional)
Where an upper limit cannot
sensibly be defined, please
provide a notional upper limit with
a short paragraph to justify why
that limit might be reasonable.
Valid entries
Please define what entries would be valid, specifying the syntax of the data
field.
For human-readable fields, please define the syntax of the data item; for
example “date of birth” valid entries would be
dd/mm/yyyy
Where:
-
“dd” is a two-digit number representing the day of the month in which
the person was born
“mm” is a two-digit number representing the calendar month in which
the person was born
yyyy is the four-digit number of the year in which the person was born.
Where the field is a structured alpha-numeric string, please define the syntax
using alpha-numeric placeholder characters:
A = Upper-case alpha characters
a = Lower-case alpha characters
N = Numerical character [0-9]
X = Upper-case alphanumeric characters [A-Z or 0-9]
x = Lower-case alphanumeric characters [a-z or 0-9]
% = Special characters, including punctuation, parenthesis and mathematical
characters and the @ symbol.
An example of a structured alpha-numeric string might be the NTN in the format
AAA/XXX/NNN/A
Notes
Notes should expand upon any part of the definition where further information
may be useful. This additional information may provide context, explain which
reports the data item is used in or highlight where strict rules may cause
problems with “real world” data.
In the above example of a structured alpha-numeric string for NTNs, the notes
section can be used to provide additional information about the field;
NTN – AAA/XXX/NNN/A
Where AAA = 3 letter alpha-code for deanery organisation eg NTH (Northern) or
TSD (Tri Services Deanery)
XXX = 3 letter or number specialty code as per agreed specialty list held at
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/data-collections/informationsupporting-our-data-collections
NNN = Sequence number of trainee on programme – may be re-cycled or
unique.
A = Alpha character to denote which pathway to accreditation.
Validation (or
business) rules
Any rules, additional to the prescribed format rule, which must be adhered to.
For example for field “date of birth” –
- must not be future date,
- must not be less than 18 years prior to programme start date
- must not be more than 65 years prior to programme start date
These validation (or business) rules will develop over time to reflect the
changing nature of postgraduate education.
Field history
Historical amendments to data specification; eg
- Addition of “Australian Aboriginal” to ethnicity table – 16/17/2009
- Removal of “Chinese – Pre 2001 coding” from ethnicity table –
15/05/2007
Where future changes are agreed, these should be added to the dataset with an
“in effect from” date. It should be noted that records prior to the “in effect from”
date carry no expectation of being updated to include the new data items.
If the record is for a trainee still in training, there may be an requirement to add
the new data, however retrospective data entry should be an extraordinary
undertaking.
Interactions
(Dynamic
behaviour)
Where the data within this field affects what data can be held in others, or is
affected by other data, explain:
What is affected
A description of the effects
How this behaviour can be tested or enforced
Examples:
- “Specialty” will limit the available options for “Subspecialty”
- If “ARCP Outcome” is “not assessed” then “reason for non-assessment”
becomes available.
Testing and enforcement should explain how the database user should be
warned of the validation failure.