Linking programme memberships and placements

Description

At present there is no data-level relationship between placements and programme memberships in TSS/TIS. This means that some functionality to guide trainee doctors with e.g. their onboarding journey is difficult to implement, because we cannot easily determine which real-world placement(s) will proceed from a new programme membership.

Business issues to investigate:

1. What value would establishing this linkage unlock for TIS and TSS? [various]

2. What non-technical obstacles exist that have prevented the relationship being made in the past? Are these obstacles still valid? How could they be addressed? [no particular obstacles, just not part of legacy system]

Technical issues to investigate:

1. Are there business rules which could be used to define this relationship? [yes]

2. Do we have the data in TIS to be able to process these business rules? [yes]

3. What would the data model look like (one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many)? [1 PM → many placements]

4. What other attributes are needed to be stored with a given linkage, if any? [date, possibly metrics of strength of auto-linkage]

5. Given existing legacy data, are there rules we should use to exclude some programme memberships placements from being automatically linked, because the relevant data is unreliable / low quality? [likely to be poor auto-linkage of pre-2017 data, greatest interest is in current / future placements / PMs]

6. Are there cases where manual intervention is required to (de)link a placement from a programme membership, and should this functionality be available to LOs or trainees or both? What user role(s) would have this ability in TIS? Should the data be authored / owned by TIS or TSS? [LOs would specify the link, data owned by TIS, user roles TBD]

7. What restrictions are needed on the creation of these independently of each other?  That probably goes for the validation with any changes too.

8. Can the linkage between a placement and a programme membership change, and if so what would trigger this change (e.g. delinking a placement if the programme membership start date changes)? Are there any specific notifications that would need to be raised for downstream processes or reporting when these events happen? Also think about deletion.

9. What would the TIS and TSS data structures look like (and for TSS in particular, how might the trainee profile need to be remodelled)? [TIS: a linking table, TSS: a (collection of) parent-PM UUID(s) within the trainee profile placement subdocuments]

10. For tis-trainee-sync, what would the implications be for (a) cascading changes to related records within tis-trainee-sync and (b) raising events for downstream processes

11. In rough estimate (e.g. developer-weeks), how much effort would be required to implement this in TIS and in TSS?