Gender is a characteristic of a person which must always exist. It is captured on registration and is mandatory for a person (and optional for a prospect person) so once the person registration process is complete, a gender evidence record is created automatically. Gender records can be updated with corrections and successions. For example, a client might contact the organization to say he incorrectly recorded his gender as female during an online application for benefits. The user would view his gender record and correct the value from ‘female’ to ‘male’.
The client may later contact the organization to inform them of a gender change which took place on a particular date. In this situation, the user would edit the existing gender record, entering a new gender value with an effective date of change set to the date on which the gender changed. Updating a record with a succession is therefore recording a change in details from a particular date.
Gender records brokered from another case are processed automatically. Because there can only ever be one gender record,the system simply checks for a gender record and if one exists, the system checks if the incoming record is logically identical to the existing record, by comparing the ‘gender’ attribute on both. If the attributes do not match, the system updates the existing record held with the details on the incoming record (where the incoming record has the latest received date). This update will either result in a correction to the gender (i.e. because the gender was recorded incorrectly initially) or a change in gender from a different effective date. To determine this, the system will compare the effective date of change on both records and if the incoming record has a later effective date of change, it will assume the gender has changed from that date. This means that from the original effective date, the client will be recorded as one gender and from a later date, they are recorded as another gender.