Turnaways should not be considered a service provided to clients. Instead, they should be treated separately from services, like Appointments, Waiting Lists, or Calls & Visits Logs are not services.

Longer explanation:

When a Turnaway is added, this creates a record in HIFIS_Services. Among other things, this means that most reports that look at how many clients received services in a date range would include clients that were ONLY turned away in those reports. This is a standard reporting method for looking at, say, demographics and characteristics of a service provider's clients.

It used to be that this was passingly okay because some communities used Turnaways to record Diversion efforts. However, now that the Diversion module exists, there is no rationale whatsoever to consider a Turnaway a service, other than the effort required to change it.

In order to change it:

• Devs would need to change how a Turnaway is stored -- add some extra fields to HIFIS_Turnaways and bypass use of HIFIS_Services

• Reports that reference Turnaways, such as Turnaways Summary, would need to be updated

• Most reports would not be affected, and many that simply reference HIFIS_Services would be improved

Note that this conversation has nothing to do with whether Turnaways count as activity or not - a Turnaway currently keeps clients active as do a number of non-services like adding Consent or an Appointment, so there would be no change suggested on the activity/inactivity front.