Hi @hernandezmachava
There have been two cases where I either did or wanted to use a repeatable stage - one for community activities where people would gather for multiple sessions and one for follow ups. For the first, I made a repeatable stage, such as “community dialogue session” and just a data element to note the session number and topic. But I found the analytics complicated, so I ended up making non-repeatable program stages (“session 1” “session 2” “session 3”…) for all planned sessions. The other one was follow ups - if we were documenting phone calls or home visits in order to reach a certain outcome (to find out if someone used a self-test or something). It worked great in the client profile to see the timeline and the number of encounters or attempts, but when it came to event reports, it was hard to figure out what was going on (also see this thread: Using the same data element in multiple stages causing a conflict in event reports?), and even with program indicators like if I wanted to count the number of TEIs who received three or more follow ups, there were a lot of errors on the data collection side with them trying to keep track of which “follow up number” it was. I always have a compulsory yes/no data element in every program stage to ensure there aren’t blank stages or that I’m able to sort of validate my event counts later. It’s probably my inexperience but I wanted a way to have an indicator, for example, where the expression was TEI count and the filter was event count for the repeatable stage > 3 (meaning, the client received more than 3 follow ups). Or another example, if we had a data element in the stage for “follow up outcome”, and the response for the first two follow ups was “client not reached” and then “client reached” and then the next stage “client not reached”, and I wanted to know how many clients were ever reached. If you do an event count, you may count the same client multiple times, and if you do TEI count, it’s not clear which response over multiple events will determine the count. These are obviously very specific use cases and it wasn’t that hard to simply have non-repeatable stages “follow up 1” “follow up 2” “follow up 3”, knowing that realistically we are not following up on the same client more than 5 times.
I think we’ve discussed on other threads problems with program indicators where you end up having to set up all possible combinations of attendance!
Help needed with setting up a tracker - #2 by Natalie_Tibbels
Maybe others with more expertise have other ideas on the repeatable stage question, because I agree it’s more elegant.