Author

Eugene Hickey

Published

November 17, 2020

Modified

July 12, 2024

The 2020 vintage was my first time at an NHSr Community event, and boy was it impressive.

Being the year that is in it, everything was online. That still feels a bit surreal. My experience of these kind of events this year has been a bit hit-and-miss, but NHSr got pretty everything right, making a rewarding and enjoyable week. Proof that when you have the saviour-faire, the joie-de-vivre will still come through. Sans souci.

This must have been a whole team effort from lots of people, but I have to give special plaudits to Anastasiia and Mohammed.

My personnel highlights of the week:

My take-aways from the conference:

And I got to talk. I’m always nervous about presenting, but always glad I did it afterwards. I just wish I had some of the charisma of a Ben Goldacre. For one thing, we’re in the middle of a six week lockdown in Ireland, so it gave me the chance to talk to people who aren’t in my family, or the usual gang from work. Preparing the talk was an experience in itself; part of it was laying out the diversity of ways to visualise our data in R so I ended up making a series of plots in formats I hadn’t used before. And I got a really nice question from Zoe Turner (about catering for accessibility in plots), an issue that has set me thinking, definitely necessary of further investigation.

And regrets:

Final thoughts. In my book, NHSr Community is on the right track. The people behind it have a clear vision. My impression is that there is an ethos; taking healthcare to a new level using measurement and statistics, and a spirit; fostering new skills with an attitude of open engagement. It’s pretty inspiring.

Eugene Hickey, Technology University, Dublin - Lecturer in Physics

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For attribution, please cite this work as:
Hickey, Eugene. 2020. “NHSr – Rguably the Best Conference in the World.” November 17, 2020. https://nhs-r-community.github.io/nhs-r-community/blog/nhsr-rguably-the-best-conference-in-the-world.html.