Web-based Database of Questionnaire study with Allied Health Professionals
Mohammad Al-Mahmodi
September 2011
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of
Master of Science in Information Technology
Computing Science and Mathematics
University of Stirling
Abstract
As technology improves over time so does the development of skill and performance of individuals especially in the health sector such as hospitals, clinics and treatment centres. GPs, Allied Health Professionals (AHP) such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, dieticians and nursing professionals are continuously improving and finding ways to improve their skills, knowledge and performance. Hence, the use of questionnaires to assess the practitioners by patients and this can be referred to as the consultation and relational measure empathy (CARE). This evaluation is carried out between the practitioner and the patient where the patient gives a feedback after a session. The patient is given the opportunity to assess the practitioner by answering questions in the CARE measure questionnaire and then returned to the practitioner. The feedback provided by patients about practitioners gives the practitioners an opportunity to improve their performance and skills.
The objective of this project is to measure the capacity and qualifications of practitioners and nurses in dealing with patients and this is compared with the performance of other practitioners. This measure includes 10 questions, each question has 6 options from the poor to excellent in the following order is Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent, and Does not apply. A Practitioner is expected to collect 50 questionnaire from patients , which is entered into the system and then answer some demographic questions such as age, gender, profession then the system will give a feedback and his/her performance is evaluated.
The website was designed using mainly PHP language, HTML and a strict version of HTML (XHTML). For several reasons, PHP is a free, open sources and simple language used by the server side only, also it is inherent language to HTML, to build and design dynamic pages. The SQL database is used to store data and information of users and information that will be submitted by users using forms or applications. The data is submitted and inserted into database and saved in tables.
The website was created to include a login page, the forms for questionnaires, result page which is allow the practitioners to see who many questionnaires have been completed and a profile page to display the user’s personal information details that was completed from practitioner demographic questionnaire page.
Attestation
I understand the nature of plagiarism, and I am aware of the University’s policy on this.
I certify that this dissertation reports original work by me during my University project except for the following:
· The code discussed in Section 5.6 was partly taken from [16].
· The code discussed in Section 5.9 was partly taken from [17]
· The code discussed in Section 5.14 and 5.16 were partly taken from [18]
· Some Codes and ideas used in designing the website were taken partly from[19]
· The structure of the tables used to describe the use cases in chapter 3 was taken from [10]
Signature Date
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my father and my mother and I would like to thank them for their support and supporting me at all times since the start of my scholarship until I finished my studies in the UK.
I would like to thank my government represented in King Abdullah who gave me this opportunity to complete my study.
I would like to thank my supervisor Kevin Swingler who helped me in no small way by giving me advice and guidance on how to solve problems.
I would also like to thank the client who gave me this opportunity to complete my degree with this project.
Finally, I would like to thank the staff of the Institute of Computer Science and Mathematics and lecturers who taught me in all courses.
Table of Contents
Abstract i
Attestation ii
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents iv
List of Figures viii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Background and Context 1
1.2 Scope and Objectives 1
1.3 Achievements 1
1.4 Overview of Dissertation 2
1.4.1 Chapter 1 2
1.4.2 Chapter 2 2
1.4.3 Chapter 3 2
1.4.4 Chapter 4 2
1.4.5 Chapter 5 3
1.4.6 Chapter 6 3
1.4.7 Chapter 7 3
2 State-of-The-Art 4
2.1 Introduction 4
2.2 Differences between Electronic (Web-based) and Paper-based Questionnaires 4
2.2.1 Paper Questionnaires 5
2.2.2 Web-based Questionnaires 6
1. Accessibility 8
2. Usability 9
2.3 Review of Languages/Technologies 9
2.3.1 Languages used in the design of the site 9
2.3.2 Markup Languages 9
2.3.2.1 HTML 9
2.3.2.2 XHTML 10
2.3.3 Style Sheets 10
2.3.3.1 Cascading Style Sheets 10
2.3.4 Server Side Scripting 10
2.3.4.1 PHP 10
2.3.5 Database 11
2.3.5.1 phpMyAdmin 11
2.3.6 Alternative Technologies 11
2.3.6.1 ASP /ASP.NET 11
2.3.6.2 ColdFusion 12
2.3.6.3 Java Servlets 12
3 Analysis and Use Cases 13
3.1 Introduction 13
3.2 Use Cases 13
3.2.1 Log in 14
3.2.2 Registration 15
3.2.3 Care Patient Feedback 16
3.2.4 Practitioner Demographic Questionnaire 17
3.2.5 Practitioner Feedback Questionnaire 18
3.2.6 Admin Page 19
3.2.7 Change Password 20
3.2.8 Log Out 21
4 Website Design 22
4.1 Website Design Requirement 22
4.1.1 User Requirements 22
4.1.2 Technical requirements 22
4.2 Website’s Layout and Structure 24
4.2.1 Main Web Pages 25
4.2.1.1 Index/Home Page 25
4.2.1.2 How to use this website Page 25
4.2.1.3 Log In Page 25
4.2.1.4 Registration Page 25
4.2.1.5 Welcome/Home Page 25
4.2.1.6 Profile Page 25
4.2.1.7 Enter more data page 25
4.2.1.8 Care Patient Feedback Page 26
4.2.1.9 Practitioner Demographic Questionnaire Page 26
4.2.1.10 Practitioner Feedback Questionnaire 26
4.2.1.11 Result Page 26
4.2.1.12 Change Password Page 26
4.2.1.13 Change Password Page 26
4.2.1.14 Log Out Page 26
4.2.2 Access denied Pages 26
4.3 Page Design 27
4.3.1 Colour 27
4.3.2 Text 27
4.3.3 Page Layout 27
4.3.4 Navigational Aids 28
4.4 Database Design 28
4.4.1 Database Tables 29
4.4.1.1 User Table 29
4.4.1.2 Patient Table 29
4.4.1.3 Practitioner Table 29
4.4.1.4 Feedback Table 29
5 Implementation 30
5.1 Database 30
5.2 Database Security 31
5.2.1 Password Protection and Encryption 31
5.2.2 The use of the function mysql_real_escape_string () 31
5.3 Home Page/index page 32
5.4 How to use this website Page 32
5.5 Logging into the website 33
5.5.1 Registration Page 33
5.5.2 Log in page 35
5.6 Sessions 36
5.7 Welcome/Home Page 37
5.8 Admin Pages 38
5.9 Profile Page 40
5.10 Enter more data page 42
5.11 Care Patient Feedback Form 43
5.12 Practitioner Demographic Questionnaire 45
5.13 Practitioner Feedback Questionnaire 46
5.14 Getting Results/Result Page 47
5.15 Changing Passwords 48
5.16 Logging Out 49
5.17 Layout of the website 50
5.16.1 Keeping the design simple 50
5.16.2 Readable Texts and Fonts 50
5.16.3 The use of Colours 50
5.16.4 Webpage Dimension 51
5.16.5 Navigation and Links 51
6 Testing 52
6.1 Testing the functionality of the website 52
6.1.1 Testing website navigation 52
6.1.2 Database testing 52
6.1.3 Testing Form submissions 53
6.1.4 Testing user sessions 53
6.1.5 Browser Compatibility testing 53
6.2 Usability Testing 53
6.2.1 Designing the test 54
6.2.2 Choosing/selecting the Users 54
6.2.3 Conducting the test 54
6.2.4 Analysis 54
6.2.4.1 Feedback from Client 54
6.2.4.2 Feedback from Users 55
7 Conclusion 56
7.1 Summary 56
7.2 Future Work 56
References 58
Appendix 1 60
Appendix 2 – User guide 63
List of Figures
Figure 1. A Questionnaire prepared on paper by the Royal College of Physicians. 6
Figure 2. A demo employee Questionnaire used by People Insight for measuring staff performances for various institutions and companies. 7
Figure 3. This diagram illustrates the log in use case 14
Figure 4. This diagram illustrates User Registration use case 15
Figure 5. This diagram illustrates Care Patient Feedback use case 16
Figure 6. This diagram illustrates Practitioner Demographic Questionnaire use case 17
Figure 7. This diagram illustrates Practitioner Feedback Questionnaire use case 18
Figure 8. This diagram illustrates the Admin use case 19
Figure 9. This diagram illustrates Change of password use case 20
Figure 10. This diagram illustrates the Log out use case 21
Figure 11. The Structure of the website 24
Figure 12. The Website’s database and tables associated with the database. 28
Figure 13. The website’s home page 32
Figure 14. The page describing how to use the website 33
Figure 15. The registration page 34
Figure 16. The Log In page 35
Figure 17. The home page after logging into the website 38
Figure 18. The Admin Page 40
Figure 19. The Profile Page 41
Figure 20. Enter more Data Page 42
Figure 21. The CARE Patient Feedback form 44
Figure 22. The Practitioner Demographic Questionnaire 45
Figure 23. Practitioner Feedback Questionnaire 47
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1 Introduction
1.1 Background and Context
Questionnaires are becoming more widespread and are continually being used by employers to assess and evaluate the performance of employees as well as to ensure that employees can use the relevant feedback to improve their performance.
Therefore, there is a need to continuously improve the ways and manner data is collected from questionnaires especially from paper to electronic. This is because paper-based questionnaires are becoming more complicated to manage whereby data collected using paper-based questionnaires can be quite huge and unmanageable over a period of time especially if it involves storing the forms.
It is in this regard a website and a database were designed and implemented to enable the use and storage data from questionnaires used to assess and evaluate the performances of allied health and nursing professionals and compared with their peers. The website is to enable practitioners complete questionnaires quickly compared with paper questionnaires and which may take a considerable time to distribute and complete. It also provides a platform which enables practitioners to obtain instant feedback about their performance in terms of patient-perceived empathy and relational skills. The feedback received by the practitioner can then be acted upon which gives them the opportunity to improve their own performance.
1.2 Scope and Objectives
The objective of this project is to design a web-based platform that would enable Allied Health Professionals (AHP) and nursing professionals to enter their 50 CARE scores, plus some basic demographic information which is used to measure the abilities and performances of a practitioner and then compared with other practitioner colleagues.
1.3 Achievements
The website was designed and implemented to allow users (practitioners) to access the website by viewing the website as guests or by registering and logging in over a session to enter their CARE measure scores via a questionnaire which is submitted into the database.
A practitioner demographic questionnaire was also designed and implemented to enable practitioners fill in their demographic information. The details from the practitioner demographic questionnaire which were submit and the number of the CARE measure forms completed are can be viewed from the result page enabling the practitioner to see his/her progress so far.
The design and implementation of the website specifications and structure can be described as the main achievement of the project, because the features (database, layout and structure) of the website were designed using the appropriate web development and design elements, methods and techniques by striking a balance between a high standard of web design and making the website user-friendly.
1.4 Overview of Dissertation
This dissertation consists of 7 chapters and these chapters can briefly be discussed as follows:
1.4.1 Chapter 1
Introduction: This chapter focuses on the main idea of the project and the goals of the project. What was achieved and how they were achieved during the course of the project. In addition to this, the main pages in the project.
1.4.2 Chapter 2
State of the art: This chapter discusses the types of questionnaire and the uses of questionnaires. Differences and comparisons were drawn between paper-based and electronic-based questionnaires. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the questionnaires are also discussed. Languages and Technologies used in the design and implementation of the website as well as alternative languages/technologies are reviewed and also discussed in this chapter.
1.4.3 Chapter 3
Analysis and use cases: This chapter focuses on analysis and potential use cases. It discusses the tasks that will be performed by the user and the type of tasks that can be carried out in the website. Every step of the use cases are analysed in terms of logging into the website from the front page using the login page to the questionnaire pages and then other pages until the end point is achieved by logging out .
1.4.4 Chapter 4
Website Design: The Design chapter discusses the design of the website, how to go about designing the website, design specifications and design requirements, a preview of how the website will look like before implementing the design, the website’s layout and structure , preliminary web pages as well as the database to be designed.
1.4.5 Chapter 5
Implementation: This chapter discusses the implementations of the design specifications and requirements discussed in the design chapter. The implementation focuses on the various web pages in the website, the database and layout of the website.
1.4.6 Chapter 6
Testing: This chapter discusses how the website was tested and the types of test carried out (Functionality and Usability testing). The test carried out were analysed while feedbacks and suggestions from users were also discussed.
1.4.7 Chapter 7
Conclusion: This chapter summarises the previous chapters, limitations of the project and future work are also considered and discussed in this chapter.
2 State-of-The-Art
2.1 Introduction
In the present day, questionnaires are increasing being used to get feedbacks in other to measure their performance(s) against other colleagues. This type of assessment or employee performance measure is becoming increasingly important in many of the Public and Private institutions such as hospitals, schools and other sectors and sections of the economy.
The main objective of questionnaires used for performance measure is to evaluate employees and compare them to other colleagues usually through feedback forms or other feedback methods in order to improve their professional development.