Hospital Equipment Loan System.

Cedric John Computer Science – Major Project 01/04/02

◉ Introduction and Specification:

Like many businesses, HELS are starting to make use of computers and computer systems to make the day-to-day operation of their company easier on the management and more efficient. As the nature of the business is unique and no existing packages are suitable for handling the business demands and requirements and has been decided that a custom made application should be designed to meet this challenge.

Hospital Equipment Loan System specified that such a system should be able to:

Have the ability to store details of the equipment.

Have a suitable item code to be devised, which identifies each piece of equipment individually, while indicating what type of equipment it is.

Find the following information for any individual piece of equipment:

Whether it is available, being repaired or out on loan
If on loan, to whom and at what address or ward number
If on loan, when it is due to be returned or the loan renewed
If being repaired, when was it sent for repair

The package needs to be suitable for the required purpose, to satisfy the set criteria, and importantly be easy to use and maintain to make life easier for HELS staff – the program should improve the efficiency of the business and not make things more difficult than they already are.

Example of the type of equipment that must be loaned and kept track of:

◉ Design – Data Input and Validation:

The information required by the program will be input using text boxes, as used by most other applications, and will be arranged in a logical order onscreen for easy navigation and association.

The text boxes automatically support features such as copy and paste shortcuts, and single-level undo – in case text is deleted accidentally. These features are available from the right click menu of these text boxes as shown.

Depending on the type of data, if there is only a limited selection of available values, I will make use of a different control, which allows the selection of a value from a list, shown to the left. For example, there are only a finite number of wards to which a patient can belong. The fact that I used a combo box limits or eliminates the occurrence for errors because the user is not inputting information but merely choosing from a list.

Validation of input:

This data will be checked for validation in real-time as the data is entered from the keyboard. This is made possible for the text boxes in Visual Basic are using the code “TextBox_change” event, which is run every time the data contained within the text box changes. It is then possible to write code that will check the value entered and then give a visual indication if the value is appropriate or not by changing the colour, font and background of the text boxes.

The drop-down list boxes for the customer details form does not need validating, as it is only possible to select a valid ward from the list – no invalid wards are available.

The use of validation reminds the user to complete all information. So if the user leaves out any specific information, an error message will appear.

◉ Design – Data Output:

The program outputs data in two ways. One is the information displayed on-screen to the user. The second method of output is the printed output that the program must produce, of all the equipment borrowed and brought back, in short all details inputted by the users and brought together and printed off in one small report.

On-screen Output:

Entering of customer details / ward

Selecting of equipment

Entering the access password

Error messages

Validation rules

Printed Outputs:

Customer details and equipment

Time length of loan and date

Management Statistics

The printed output is produced using the print faculties built into Visual Basic exposed through the printer object; this will then use any available printers on the system to produce the output from the program. To give the printouts a professional appearance and style, I have designed a logo for the company which is saved as a graphics file in the ...