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The Findings About Events or Interventions structure, referred to as the FA Structure in this section, represents collected data about an event or intervention that cannot be represented within an event or intervention record or as a supplemental qualifier to such a record. For example, this may be the case when:

• There are several items which may be grouped together. If so, the FA structure allows the use of FAGRPID, FACAT, or FASCAT to group the items.
• The observation is best represented in a Findings general observation class structure. If so, the FA structure allows the use of FAORRES, FAORRESU, and FAMETHOD for results, units, and methods respectively.
• There are multiple evaluators. If so, the FA structure allows the use of FAEVALID.  

The variable --OBJ is unique to the FA Structure and is used with FATESTCD to represent what the topic of the observation is. FATESTCD describes the measurement/evaluation and FAOBJ describes the event or intervention that the measurement/evaluation is about. When collected data will be represented in a qualifier variable and are represented in the FA domain, the name of the variable will be used as the value of FATESTCD (e.g., FATESTCD = "OCCUR" and FATEST = "Occurrence Indicator"). The use of the same names (e.g., OCCUR) for both qualifier variables in the observation classes and FATESTCD is deliberate, but should not lead implementers to conclude that the collection of such data (e.g., occurrence) must be stored in the FA domain. If the data describe the underlying event or intervention as a whole and share its timing, then the data should be stored as a qualifier of the events or interventions record. A record in FA may or may not have a parent record in an events or interventions domain. If an FA record does have a parent record, the value in FAOBJ should match the value in --TERM or --TRT, unless the parent domain is dictionary coded or subject to controlled terminology. In such cases, the value represented in FAOBJ will match the value represented in --DECOD.

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When to Use the FA Structure

The FA Structure represents collected data about an event or intervention that cannot be represented within an event or intervention record or as a supplemental qualifier to such a record. This may be the case when:

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The FA structure will be used when the following criteria are met:

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