Good question. There is not just one answer, but you will have to pick the approach that is best for you. Or the least bad. It depends on how the data will be entered and how it will be reported. I would try to avoid double counting. Here are some ideas:
1-> Have a category option for each type of person, so that everyone is counted in only one place. I don’t know if this is practical or possible for your example, because it would mean an option for every set of categories that could go together. It would be something like:
Category: Technician type
Category options for Technician type:
- No extra training
- Inpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate and traditional Chinese medicine
- Inpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate without traditional Chinese medicine
- Outpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate and traditional Chinese medicine
- Outpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate without traditional Chinese medicine
- Inpatient registered nurses with traditional Chinese medicine
- Outpatient registered nurses with traditional Chinese medicine
…
The advantage is that everyone is counted only once. The disadvantage is that you would have to know ahead of time what all the valid combinations are.
If you do this, you could create some category option groups for reporting. For example:
Category option group: General practitioner
Category options for this group:
- Inpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate and traditional Chinese medicine
- Inpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate without traditional Chinese medicine
…
Category option group: Traditional Chinese medicine
Category options for this group:
- Inpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate and traditional Chinese medicine
- Outpatient licensed physicians with general practitioner certificate and traditional Chinese medicine
- Inpatient registered nurses with traditional Chinese medicine
…
(other category option groups…)
2-> You could create multiple categories. For example:
Category: Area of work
Category options for area of work:
- Inpatient
- Outpatient
- Other
Category: Licensing
Category options for licensing:
- Registered nurse
- Licensed physician
- Licensed physician with general practitioner training certificate
- Unlicensed
Category: Practitioner type
Category options for Practitioner type
- Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine
- Not practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine
Category Combo: Technician type
Categories for combo Technician type:
- Area of work
- Licensing
- Practitioner type
If you have category combo with more than two categories, I don’t think this will work with standard data entry forms. You may have to create your own custom form.
3-> Create a different data element for each type of worker you want to count, for example:
Data Elements:
- Health technicians (persons)
- number of medical practitioners
- number of licensed physicians working in the inpatient department
- Number of persons registered as general practice
…
The person entering the data will have to supply all the different numbers. Because they are different data elements they will not be double-counted.
I do not have a lot of experience modelling different systems. Perhaps someone with more experience than I could add their suggestions.