Rodrigo Brice�o
> I have data about discharges by service in a variable called "servicio".
> For some reason hospital divided the Obstetrics service in those 6 groups.
>
> HOSP. OBSTETRICIA
> HOSP. OBSTETRICIA C
> HOSP. OBSTETRICIA P
> HOSP. PEDIATRIA
> OBSTETRICIA C
> OBSTETRICIA P
>
> What can I do in order to aggrupate the 6 discharges values in a
> unique service called Obstetrics? I need this aggrupation in
> order to calculate Average Lenght of Stay.
I will guess that this is a string variable.
What unites five of these cases is the occurrence
of "OBSTETRICIA", so one criterion to catch those is
if index(servicio, "OBSTETRICIA")
and for the other case a criterion is
if servicio == "HOSP. PEDIATRIA"
or the slightly more general
if trim(servicio) == "HOSP. PEDIATRIA"
So what you want might well be (all one command)
replace servicio = "OBSTETRICIA"
if index(servicio, "OBSTETRICIA") |
trim(servicio) == "HOSP. PEDIATRIA"
Here
if index(servicio, "OBSTETRICIA")
is short-hand for
if index(servicio, "OBSTETRICIA") > 0
-index()- is documented as a string function.
The underlying principle behind that short-hand is explained at
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/trueorfalse.html
or in Stata Journal 2(1), 86-102 (2002): see Section 5
of that article.
Nick
[email protected]
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