Latest content

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Books

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Open Analytics Resources
data-science
analysis
links
training

Useful links for health and care analysts and data scientists.

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Health Inequalities
data-science
health-inequalities

This project is a collection of information and knowledge related to analytical work on “Health Inequalities”, as performed in the NHS and the wider UK Health and Social…

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NHS-R Way book
code-of-conduct
training

Everything you need or want to know about NHS-R Community including: how to contribute and get involved, code styles, training preparation materials.

Photo of four open books laid out on top of each other.

Statement on Tools
data-science
installation
getting-started

In this book we’ve compiled a set of technical resources, links and write down our experiences of using open data science programs like R and Python within the NHS and…

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Blogs

Blogs are submitted from NHS-R Community members.

Photo of three women collaborating with laptops. Attributed to WOCinTechChat.com

The importance of community in NHS data science
NHS-R
I was alerted to the news of NHS England’s fate by my phone pinging a news app alert to me mid-meeting.
I try to avoid such distractions, but for obvious reasons this one…
Claire Welsh
Mar 31, 2025

Graphic of a laptop with stylised analytics on the screen.

Predictive Analytics within healthcare - Random Forest models for predicting length of stay
Predictive Analytics
Machine Learning
dplyr
SQL
Hi! This is my first blog post here and I’m excited to have the chance to share my thoughts with you on this topic, as it is something that has seemingly exploded in…
Joseph Mosley
Feb 27, 2025

GitHub Action with search towards the right where I had searched multiple dashes

NHS-R Community GitHub Actions - spelling
GitHub Action
Spell checking can be a really important feature of coding, particularly when creating reports, dashboards or websites. Some R solutions have spelling checks built into…
Zoë Turner
Feb 14, 2025

Photo of two brick walls facing each other and with perspective seem to be closer to each other at the furthest point

Creating synthetic data using the synthpop package
Data
This blog was originally a vignette in the NHSRdatasets package and refers to the synthetic data in that package for NEWS (National Early Warning Score).
Oct 1, 2024

Two stacks of paper side by side filling the height of the image

CQC directory data vignette
Data
The following was submitted to the NHSRdatasets package in 2020 but was too big as data to be accepted by the package (CRAN has size limits). However, the vignette that…
Martine Wauben
Sep 29, 2024

Image of a big red button with the word 'help'

How to ask for help
NHS-R
R tips
To enable others to help you, you’ll need to include a reprex, or reproducible example - a minimal example of the data and code you’re using, so they can recreate the problem.
Lyn Howard
Jul 31, 2024

Photo of the NHS-R/NHS.pycom image projected on the Cricket large screen at Edgbaston

NHS-R/NHS.Pycom conference 2023 my experience of the event
Conference
The NHS-R/NHS.Pycom conference, is a great event to share on a yearly basis, our passion for advanced healthcare, promoting the use of our core R language for our healthcare…
Pablo Leon-Rodenas
Jun 4, 2024

Screenshot of the settings page on GitHub

Publish on GitHub
GitHub
RMarkdown
Quarto
I had a question on this directly on how to publish and then another one popped up on the NHS-R Community Slack so, in the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) this is a…
Zoë Turner
Jun 3, 2024

Screenshot of the R code to create a tibble used in the blog

Showcasing a function - separate()
R tips
This was written originally in an Excel spreadsheet and used {datapasta} to copy into R as code to build the same data frame. {datapasta} can be access through RStudio as an…
Zoë Turner
Mar 12, 2024
 
Recoding an NA and back again
R tips
This was written originally in an Excel spreadsheet and used {datapasta} to copy into R as code to build the same data frame. {datapasta} can be access through RStudio as an…
Zoë Turner
Mar 12, 2024
 
Building a Quarto website for NHS-R Community
Reflections
A few years ago Mohammed A Mohammed, who was integral to getting NHS-R Community set up, suggested I might like to get involved by creating a website for NHS-R Community. At…
Zoë Turner
Feb 24, 2024

Photo of a meeting with a laptop, pad and paper and a coffee mug.

Navigating the Data-Driven Frontier: Insights from an NHS-R Committee Member
Committee
Greetings, esteemed members of the NHS-R Community, data enthusiasts, and healthcare aficionados! It is with great excitement that I share my recent journey as a committee…
Prajwal Khairnar
Feb 6, 2024
 
What is a “proper” data scientist anyway?
NHS-R
I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years about whether they’re a “proper” data scientist. When I started writing code to analyse data there were no data scientists in…
Chris Beeley
Jan 8, 2024

Photo of a meeting with a laptop, pad and paper and a coffee mug.

Coffee and Code
NHS-R
Coffee and Code is an informal community gathering where people can come together to learn, share, and collaborate on all things R. People can give presentations on their…
Simon Wellesley-Miller
Nov 14, 2023

Notes used to coordinate the unconferencing events

What was the “Unconference”?
Conference
I’m going to invite controversy and say it was the best part of this year’s NHS R Community annual conference.
Ben Murch
Oct 30, 2023
 
NHS-R Community needs help
NHS-R
I’ve been an analyst for over a decade in the NHS and for the most part I’d never been to a conference related to my work. Partly it was that they didn’t really exist but…
Zoë Turner
Oct 20, 2023
 
AphA blog – August 2023
NHS-R
Links are out now for the DataConnect23 and there is a lot to sign up to in the free week long event! It’s organised by the UK Government’s Central Digital and Data Office…
Zoë Turner
Sep 5, 2023
 
July Blog
NHS-R
Back in June I attended a Government Data Science (GDS) Toolshed meetup for Public Sector and cross Government, the name coming from the idea that we have tools that we’ve…
Zoë Turner
Jul 19, 2023
 
AphA June Blog
NHS-R
First published for the AphA June 2023 newsletter:
Zoë Turner
Jul 18, 2023
 
NHS-R newscast 25th May 2023
NHS-R
Podcast
We have another newscast from the podcast, if you don’t do the whole podcast thing here are the notes and links from what we talked about.
Zoë Turner
Jun 15, 2023
 
NHS-R newscast 20th July 2023
NHS-R
Podcast
We have another newscast from the podcast, if you don’t do the whole podcast thing here are the notes and links from what we talked about.
Zoë Turner
Jun 15, 2023
 
AphA blog – May 2023
NHS-R
SQL
First published for the AphA May 2023 newsletter:
Zoë Turner
Jun 9, 2023

NHS England 75 years

The data science assembly
NHS
By Sami Sultan, Junior Data Scientist, NHS England
Sami Sultan
Jun 9, 2023

Photograph of a computer screen with R code

RStudio and Git – selecting many files
RStudio
Git
I’m currently preparing a workshop for an introduction to Git and GitHub, in the same way we have an Introduction to R and RStudio course for NHS-R Community. But the thing…
Zoë Turner
May 23, 2023
 
AphA April 2023 Blog
NHS-R
First published for the AphA April 2023 newsletter:
Zoë Turner
Apr 25, 2023

Photograph of a computer screen with R code

Code snippets – 2 scale y axes in {ggplot2}
ggplot2
R tips
Inspired by conversations on the NHS-R Slack where code answers are lost over time (it’s not a paid account), and also for those times when a detailed comment in code isn’t…
Zoë Turner
Mar 28, 2023

White numbers scattered

Code snippets – first(), last() and nth() {dplyr} functions
dplyr
R tips
Inspired by conversations on the NHS-R Slack where code answers are lost over time (it’s not a paid account), and also for those times when a detailed comment in code isn’t…
Zoë Turner
Mar 13, 2023

Photograph of writing

Code snippets – regular expressions
Strings
R tips
Inspired by conversations on the NHS-R Slack where code answers are lost over time (it’s not a paid account), and also for those times when a detailed comment in code isn’t…
Zoë Turner
Feb 25, 2023
 
A roundup from the 2022 NHS-R Conference – Part 1
Conference
What are the latest health research applications using R? A roundup from the 2022 NHS-R conference.
Laura Moscoviz
Feb 9, 2023
 
A roundup from the 2022 NHS-R Conference – Part 2
Conference
What are the latest health research applications using R? A roundup from the 2022 NHS-R conference.
Laura Moscoviz
Feb 9, 2023
 
Guest blogger – ChatGPT
NHS-R
Podcast
Today we have a guest blogger for the NHS-R community blog- ChatGPT. Let’s see what ChatGPT thinks about the NHS-R Community.
Feb 3, 2023

Photo of taxis moving very fast so appears in streaks of colour

Fuzzy joining tables using string distance methods
Strings
tidyverse
I recently had a problem where I had two datasets containing data which I needed to join together. The two datasets had a nice 1:1 mapping between them, but unfortunately…
Tom Jemmett
Feb 3, 2023
 
NHS-R newscast 16th January 2023
NHS-R
Podcast
Time for another NHS-R newscast! You can listen to the episode, but for those of you who don’t listen to podcasts here is a roundup of what we covered
Chris Beeley
Jan 17, 2023

Photograph of a library with an elaborate staircase

Reflections on the NHS-R Community Conference
Conference
Hello, I’m Chandan Kaur, an analyst currently working at UHB NHS Trust, looking to employ more advanced analytical techniques into my work, now that the core BI stuff is out…
Chandan Kaur
Jan 11, 2023

Heart rate graph

NHS-R Workshop: Development and validation of clinical prediction models using R
Modelling
Dr Faisal provided a very comprehensive introduction to Clinical Prediction Modelling (CPM for short), focusing on the five stages of developing and validating this type of…
Eduard Incze
Dec 15, 2022

Posit

Posit + NHS-R: a Perfect Partnership!
NHS-R
Conference
In mid-November of 2022, Posit had the great opportunity to attend the NHS-R Community Conference in Birmingham, UK. While the world is still reeling from the effects of…
Nov 29, 2022
 
NHS-R newscast 28th October 2022
NHS-R
Podcast
There is a new newscast podcast available, for those of you who don’t listen to podcasts here is a summary of what we talked about. Listen to the episode, find it wherever…
Chris Beeley
Oct 30, 2022

Photograph of open envelopes

A dbplyr-based Address Matching Package
dbplyr
Addresses
Matching address records from one table to another is a common and often repeated task. This is easy when address strings can be matched exactly, although not so easy when…
Adnan Shroufi
Oct 17, 2022

Photograph of writing

Using RMD for academic writing
RMarkdown
This is a blog post that describes my experience of using RMD for academic writing. By choosing the right YAML and {knitr} package settings, and creating appropriate .docx…
Daniel Weiand
Oct 10, 2022
 
NHS-R newscast 15th August 2022
NHS-R
Podcast
NHS-R conference 2022 – Keynotes: Heather Turner from R Ladies, Jess Morley, and others. Python track. Free to all UK public sector. Fully hybrid remote/ in person
Chris Beeley
Aug 24, 2022
 
NHS-R newscast 6th July 2022
NHS-R
Podcast
Really good 1hr overview video from the Oxford Internet Institute to the Goldacre Morley report, gov initial response, and some good Q&A.
https://twitter.com/jessRmorley/stat…
Chris Beeley
Jul 29, 2022

A board with numbers that move mechanically to change

The ‘nhsnumber’ package and the joy of sharing your niche
NHS
Package
Being the author of a package with tens of thousands of users must be incredibly rewarding. All those people getting value from your work and using it to do incredible…
Mark Sellors
Jul 19, 2022

Photo of confetti

New year, new laptop, new library location, new version of R!
R tips
Eek? Starting again wasn’t nearly as painful as it used to be, thanks to {installr} and the generosity of people posting solutions online.
Cara Thompson
Jun 17, 2022

Alignment cheatsheet
ggplot2
tidyverse
Visualisations
I’ve used ggtext’s geom_textbox() a lot in my recent data visualisations, but, every time, I end up resorting to a bit of trial and error to get the alignment just right.…
Cara Thompson
May 11, 2022
 
Success story - Kate Cheema, Director of Health Intelligence, British Heart Foundation
Reflections
The Health Intelligence team at the British Heart Foundation just about still qualifies as a ‘new’ team at the stately age of 2-and-a-bit years. Our remit is to collate and…
Kate Cheema
Mar 21, 2022
 
Success story - Dr William Bryant, Senior Data Scientist, GOSH
Reflections
To create a template workflow for a stream of analytics and data presentation projects for research and operational use at GOSH. To ensure that the codebase is…
William Bryant
Mar 21, 2022
 
Success story - Dr Lydia Briggs, Data Scientist, GOSH
Reflections
Hospital surgical teams regularly hold meetings to discuss cases and events that have happened in their departments. The patient data to be discussed can be complicated and…
Lydia Briggs
Mar 21, 2022

Close up photo of a typewriter with the words 'stories matter' printed on a page

NHS Low Income Scheme
golem
shiny
html
Accessibility
Scrollytell
The NHSBSA Data Science team recently published an article investigating the take-up of the NHS Low Income Scheme in England. The NHS Low Income Scheme is a service…
Mar 18, 2022
 
Join the fun! Join NHS-R
NHS-R
The NHS-R Community is a friendly, welcoming community – open to all – and always looking for newbies (new to us, or R) or veterans to join the fun.
Mohammed Amin Mohammed
Mar 2, 2022

Using R to create column charts featuring 95% confidence intervals
Statistics
tidyverse
ggplot2
Public Health
Hello!
Daniel Weiand
Jan 5, 2022
 
What a NHS-R Community Conference it was – simply wow!
Conference
Article originally appeared on What a NHS-R Community Conference it was – simply wow! – Hutsons-hacks and was submitted by Gary Hutson – Senior Data Scientist.
Gary Hutson
Nov 16, 2021
 
Designing my first Shiny dashboard
Shiny
Functions
tidyverse
base R
GIS
zoo
plotly
The code in this blog will not work as the files have been renamed for archiving.
Pablo Leon-Rodenas
Oct 14, 2021
 
NHS-R Community Conference: view from the The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP)
Personal experience
I recently went to the second annual NHS-R conference, run by the NHS-R Community that’s promoting the use of R throughout the NHS. R being the free statistics and computer…
Robin Hinks
Sep 10, 2021

Tracking and getting download statistics for your R packages
Packages
Functions
Lists
tidyverse
I had the privilege of tapping into the R package funding stream to fund my first, and not last, CRAN package entitled NHSDataDictionaRy.
Gary Hutson
Sep 8, 2021
 
Optimising dplyr
dplyr
data.table
tidyverse
Recently in a project I was working on I encountered an issue where one code chunk in my RMarkdown report started to take a significant amount of time to run, and it was…
Tom Jemmett
Jul 15, 2021

Using {sf} to calculate catchment areas
GIS
ggplot2
R is a highly capable GIS tool, thanks to the sf package. In this post I am going to show you how you can use sf with openly available data to calculate catchment areas and…
Tom Jemmett
Jun 3, 2021

Group of people posing for the camera smiling

The Health Service Modelling Associates (HSMA) Programme – the future of analytics for health, social care and policing?
Discrete Event Simulation
5 years ago our team brought into reality a vision that we’d had for some time.  We recognised the vital importance of modelling, simulation, analytical and data science…
Daniel Chalk
May 7, 2021

Comparison bar charts for sex, edu, age and depress

Can we rely on synthetic data to overcome data governance issue in healthcare?
Synthetic dataset
Data
base R
I recently came across a term synthetic data. I start wondering what does it mean? I found that it is different from the dummy data, but in what ways and how is it…
Apr 22, 2021
 
Software licensing
NHS-R
Chris did a video on open source for analysts and data scientists published on our YouTube which also covers licences and copyright.
Chris Beeley
Mar 17, 2021

Screenshot of Slack channels including general, random, new-to-slack, help-with-r, covid19 and training

Learned from Community
NHS-R
Discrete Event Simulation
How many instant message notifications do you get a day? We get message notifications for conversations we have with others, news we subscribe from our computers…
Nujcharee Haswell
Mar 3, 2021
 
A thank you note to NHS-R Community
NHS-R
The less said about 2020 the better, but I want to write about something positive that has happened to me this week, but which was the result of work done by, and for, NHS-R…
Zoë Turner
Feb 2, 2021

Example Performance Dashboard with SPC of Lung Cancer two week wait performance

Two-Way Business Intelligence – Partnering Shiny and SQL to Capture Insights in Performance Reporting
SPC charts
Statistics
Shiny
SQL
Performance and operational reporting is one of the key functions of the Information team at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. All acute Trusts are monitored on a…
Christopher Reading-Skilton
Jan 20, 2021
 
Hexitime is shortlisted as a finalist for the HSJ Partnership Awards 2021
NHS-R
Hexitime has been shortlisted for Best Not for Profit Working in Partnership with the NHS at the HSJ Partnership Awards 2021. This recognises outstanding dedication to…
Beth Taylor
Dec 14, 2020

Screenshot of cards with people's details with links between them where connections have been set up in Hexitime

The NHS-R Community and Hexitime – Our 1st month of collaborating
NHS-R
Last month at our annual event we announced an exciting partnership between the NHS-R Community and the collaboration platform Hexitime. At the conference many of you joined…
NHS-R Community Team
Dec 11, 2020

Word cloud with words inspiring, informative and friendly prominent in size

NHS-R Community Conference – organisers’ perspective
Conference
WoW – that’s the best description we can come up with for our third NHS-R Conference 2020 which took place virtually during first two weeks of November 2020.
NHS-R Community Team
Dec 8, 2020
 
NHS-R 2020 Week Long Conference – so much great content, so little time to catch it all…
Conference
Originally appeared on: https://hutsons-hacks.info/nhs-r-2020-annual-conference and https://www.r-bloggers.com/2020/11/nhs-r-2020-week-long-conference/.
Gary Hutson
Nov 19, 2020
 
NHSr – Rguably the Best Conference in the World
Conference
The 2020 vintage was my first time at an NHSr Community event, and boy was it impressive.
Eugene Hickey
Nov 17, 2020
 
Announcing a new NHS-R + Hexitime partnership
NHS-R
It all began with one member of the NHS-R Community, reaching out and asking how she could get someone more experienced with R to give her some mentoring support.
Mohammed A Mohammed
Oct 26, 2020

Screenshot of an MS Teams with 7 people attending the book club

NHS-R Book Club
NHS-R
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience; this is a happy life.” – Mark Twain.
Nujcharee Haswell
Oct 20, 2020
 
Member profile - Robin Hinks
Personal experience
R is a powerful tool for manipulating health and care data and a lot can be learned from sharing our experiences of using R with others. We bring to you an NHS-R profile…
Robin Hinks
Oct 8, 2020

Annotating SPC plots using annotate with ggplot
SPC charts
Statistics
Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts are widely used in healthcare analytics to examine how the metric varies over time and whether this variation is abnormal.…
Christopher Reading-Skilton
Aug 13, 2020
 
We need you: share your COVID-19 work on NHSE/I’s regular mini-huddle series
Covid-19
COVID-19 has placed the value of data and analytics at the fore. This has meant an unprecedented focus on the work of health and care analysts, but also huge demand for…
Sophie Hodges
May 21, 2020

Photo of a notepad with notes written:

Forecasting R (Virtual) Workshop – the pupil’s perspective
Forecasting
I saw on the NHS-R Community slack channel that the much sought after Forecasting R Workshop led by Bahman Rostami-Tabar was moving to a virtual environment whilst most of…
Paul Bullard
May 21, 2020
 
{phsmethods}: an R package for Public Health Scotland
Packages
On Wednesday 1st April 2020, Public Health Scotland (PHS) came into being. It was formed as a result of a three-way merger between NHS Health Scotland and the Information…
Jack Hannah
Apr 30, 2020

Photo of an old typewriter with the paper ready to be typed on

Building the ONS mortality dataset
Data
Packages
Training
dplyr
Functions
Loops
Web scraping
This blog was originally a vignette for the NHSRdatasets package that I wrote when I had only been using R for about a year and I found myself contributing to a package! I…
Zoë Turner
Apr 23, 2020
 
SPC Charting in R
SPC charts
Statistics
For some time the Information Department at Worcestershire Acute NHS Trust has been making use of statistical process control (SPC) charts for internal reporting purposes.…
Christopher Reading-Skilton
Mar 13, 2020

Barchart of survey results for the question what type of organisation do you work for? The highest number is Other followed by Provider Trust

Our first ever NHS-R webinar!
NHS-R
We ran our first ever NHS-R webinar on Wednesday 19th February and it went down a storm! Chris Mainey facilitated a session on Database Connections in R which was attended…
NHS-R
Feb 21, 2020
 
Towards open health analytics: our guide to sharing code safely on GitHub
GitHub
In September 2019, our team at the Health Foundation took a big step towards making our analytics more transparent and reproducible: we launched our GitHub Page and by…
Fiona Grimm
Feb 14, 2020

NHSRdatasets meets runcharter
Data
Packages
Run charts
Statistics
The {NHSRdatasets} package made it to CRAN recently, and as it is designed for use by NHS data analysts, and I am an NHS data analyst, let’s take a look at it. Thanks to…
John MacKintosh
Feb 12, 2020

Don’t Repeat Yourself!
Functions
Data
One of the greatest benefits of using R over spreadsheets is that it’s very easy to re-use and repurpose code, for example if we need to produce the same chart over and over…
Tom Jemmett
Jan 30, 2020
 
How NHS-R Community do The Apprentice…
Personal experience
Training
One of the tasks on the Apprentice a number of years ago was for the contestants to put on a corporate event, at no small cost to the people attending I might add. It’s a…
Zoë Turner
Jan 29, 2020
 
Forecasting R
Forecasting
This workshop was only available in person but recordings from on NHS-R Community’s YouTube include: Forecasting with Multiple Seasonality and a talk at the conference on Pro…
Bahman Rostami-Tobar
Jan 8, 2020

People from the course sat around a long table chatting to each other

The first ever train the trainer class 2019
Training
The Strategy Unit, AphA (Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts) and NHS-R joined forces to deliver the first ever train the trainer (TTT) class on the 11-12th…
Mohammed A Mohammed
Jan 3, 2020
 
NHS-R Community Conference II
Personal experience
My journey to work takes me about an hour and a half, and I catch a couple of buses with Wi-Fi which means I can browse Twitter and invariably end up with hundreds of tabs…
Zoë Turner
Dec 20, 2019

Hex sticker for R users Leeds with 3 chart lines with a right skew

Welcome to Leeds
Personal experience
Trying to learn R is tricky, there are so many ways to do things that I often ended up Googling everything and still not feeling like I was doing anything the right way.
Louise Hick
Dec 11, 2019
 
A new kid on the NHS-R block
Personal experience
My journey into data science took a baby step a few years ago when I learned SQL during my global health work overseas. A dearth of good data and data sets is every global…
Nighat Khan
Nov 22, 2019
 
NHS Number Validation
NHS
Packages
NHS Numbers are the best. They are numbers that follow you through life, from birth to death, changing only with certain situations and are easy to check for validity from…
Zoë Turner
Nov 20, 2019

5 boxes with facts from the conference, 9 plenary talks, 13 workshops, 25 lightning talks, 6 hours networking and 300 delegates

The NHS-R Conference 2019
Conference
We really enjoyed our second ever NHS-R conference in Birmingham, which was attended by about 300 delegates. We tried to ensure that there was something for colleagues who…
Mohammed Amin Mohammed
Nov 15, 2019
 
NHS-R Community datasets package released
Packages
Data
Firstly, it is now available on CRAN, the major package repository for R, and can be installed like any other package, or directly from GitHub as follows:
Chris Mainey
Oct 10, 2019
 
How R changed me as an analyst
Personal experience
I suspect there are many blogs about R and why it’s so great:
Zoë Turner
Sep 11, 2019
 
Dygraphs
dygraphs
dplyr
base R
I recently presented some of the mortality surveillance charts we use to @RLadiesLondon (a very welcoming group!) and one that got some interest was a chart of…
Zoë Turner
Sep 3, 2019

Exact Matching in R
R tips
Statistics
data.table
Data
I’ve been working with a group of analysts in East London who are interested in joined-up health and social care data. They’ve created a powerful, unique dataset that shows…
Dan Lewer
Jul 30, 2019

Boxplot of monthly distribution of events from month 4 to 9

SQL Server Database connections in R
SQL
One of the things I found most difficult when learning R was getting data from our SQL Servers into R to analyse. It is easy to load csv files, or pull example datasets from…
Chris Mainey
Jul 18, 2019

A London rail travel ticket

Count of working days function
Functions
It’s at this time of year I need to renew my season ticket and I usually get one for the year. Out of interest, I wanted to find out how much the ticket cost per day, taking…
Zoë Turner
Jul 16, 2019

Introduction to Funnel Plots
Statistics
ggplot2
base R
Funnel plots are a common tool for comparing organisations or units using proportions or standardised rates. A common use of them is for monitoring mortality at hospitals.…
Chris Mainey
May 22, 2019
 
rforhealthcare.org – A free online resource for all your R related healthcare needs
Resources
Down in the South West of England we at the PenCHORD team of the NIHR CLAHRC South West Peninsula have been busy developing some online treats for all of you interested in…
Sean Manzi
Apr 18, 2019
 
Moving on with the plan… And using R to do it! My personal experience…
Personal experience
When Mohammed asked if I would be interested in doing a blog on how “we”, Information and Analytics in NHS Improvement, have been using R / R Studio I was a little…
Vicki Cruze
Apr 11, 2019
 
Format ONS spreadsheet
R tips
dplyr
A Public Health consultant colleague Ian Bowns created a report to monitor mortality within the Trust and he used the ONS weekly provisional data for the East Midlands to…
Zoë Turner
Mar 15, 2019

Screenshot of the England STPs maps with average bed occupancy during winter 2018/19 coloured

Using R to track NHS winter pressures
NHS
ggplot2
dplyr
base R
Data
Every Thursday during winter, roughly from December to March, NHS Digital releases a week’s worth of hospital performance data, known as the Daily Situation Reports. This…
Fiona Grimm
Mar 14, 2019

Animated Population pyramids in R: part 1
base R
Visualisations
tidyverse
ggplot2
Population
Since the blog was published populations statistics are available from 2018 and CCG names have changed. The blog text refers to the previous estimates from 2016 and three…
Anastasiia Zharinova
Mar 12, 2019

Moving screenshot of a shiny dashboard showing a moving charts.

Animating a Graph Over Time in Shiny
R tips
shiny
I was interested in creating an animated graph in Shiny, which allows for an interactive input. As a mock example, I created an app which shows the distribution of a…
Dan Mohamed
Mar 1, 2019

A run chart is not a run chart is not a run chart
Run charts
Statistics
Run charts are simple and powerful tools that help discriminate between random and non-random variation in data over time – for example, measures of healthcare quality.
Jacob Anhøj
Feb 26, 2019

A simple function to create nice correlation plots
Functions
Statistics
I was working with a dataset where I wanted to assess the correlation of different variables in R. As much as I like R – the outputs from the console window leave something…
Gary Hutson
Jan 31, 2019

From script-based development to function-based development and onwards to Package Based development: part 2
Packages
Functions
At the NHS R Conference, I suggested to people that they should embrace the idea of package-based development rather than script-based work.
Andrew Hill
Jan 7, 2019
 
Roadmap to collaborative working using R in the NHS: Part I- Workflows
Workflow
We finally have a tool that is data independent. R allows the scripting of a data science methodology that we can share and develop and which does not necessarily depend on…
Sebastian Zeki
Jan 7, 2019

But this worked the last time I ran it!
Packages
Debugging
Public Health
A common scenario: you are new to a programming language, chuffed that you’ve done a few bits and progressing well. A colleague hands you their code to run a regular report.…
Zoë Turner
Dec 20, 2018
 
Local Public Health joins the paRty
Reflections
Public Health
Having recently attended an R meetup in Birmingham, hearing of various user groups and hackathons that take place around certain technologies, I was getting a feeling that…
Andy Evans
Nov 22, 2018
 
Thoughts on the NHS-R conference
Conference
It’s been a few weeks since the first NHS-R conference was held in Birmingham.
John MacKintosh
Nov 15, 2018
 
NHS-R Conference: was it worth it?
Conference
Soon after I started in this role I was offered several free places to a conference on Big Data. It was aimed at Healthcare and with Big Data in the title it sounded very…
Zoë Turner
Oct 26, 2018

Wordcloud with cloud, plot and useful being the largest so most frequent

Text Mining – Term Frequency analysis and Word Cloud creation in R
Text Mining
Conference
Analysing the pre-conference workshop sentiments
Gary Hutson
Oct 22, 2018
 
NHS-R Community Conference: My experience of the day
Conference
I went to the NHS-R Community Conference in Birmingham on Tuesday.
Neil Pettinger
Oct 16, 2018
 
From script-based development to function-based development and onwards to Package Based development
Functions
At the NHS R Conference, I suggested to people that they should embrace the idea of package-based development rather than script-based work.
Andrew Hill
Oct 15, 2018
 
A simple function to install and load packages in R
Packages
I was starting to despair at the amount of packages I end up using during the task of transforming, cleaning, modelling and validating some of my models. I thought there…
Gary Hutson
Aug 17, 2018
 
NHS open source public datasets – creating realistic synthetic datasets
Synthetic dataset
Data
This blog is an initial attempt to garner interest in a project to create NHS synthetic datasets in a range of fields and also to understand the underlying principles around…
Sebastian Zeki
Aug 16, 2018
 
How to extrapolate data from data
Strings
There are many occasions when a column of data needs to be created from an already existing column for ease of data manipulation. For example, perhaps you have a body of…
Sebastian Zeki
Jul 23, 2018

5 R logos with the capital R and circle behind going from small to large in size.

Evolution of the R user
Reflections
Image adapted from source: https://www.r-project.org/logo/
Seb Fox, Julian Flowers and Georgina Anderson, Public Health England.
Jul 13, 2018
 
Even Simpler SQL
R tips
SQL
dplyr
Patient Flow
I’ve had some feedback on the last post, and rather than repeat the same thing multiple times, I’m going all @drob, and writing this instead.
John MacKintosh
Jun 27, 2018

Simpler SQL with {dplyr}
R tips
SQL
dplyr
Patient Flow
Following on from my last post, where I demonstrated R to some first time R users, I want to do a wee comparison of {dplyr} V SQL, so that folks, particularly those in the…
John MacKintosh
Jun 7, 2018

Diverging Bar Charts – Plotting Variance with ggplot2
R tips
ggplot2
base R
The aim here is to create a diverging bar chart that shows variance above and below an average line. In this example I will use Z Scores to calculate the variance, in terms…
Gary Hutson
May 24, 2018

Man sat at desk with computer, laptop and tablet facing him.

Why Government needs sustainable software too
RAP
NHS
Unlike most of the 2017/2018 cohort, when I applied to become a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, I was a civil servant rather than an academic. In this blog…
Matthew Upson
May 24, 2018

Histogram with auto binning in ggplot2
R tips
ggplot2
base R
Again, we will use the mtcars dataset and use the fields in that to produce the chart, as we are doing this there is nothing to do on the data preparation side. That leaves…
Gary Hutson
May 24, 2018

Diverging Dot Plot and Lollipop Charts – Plotting Variance with ggplot2
R tips
ggplot2
base R
The data preparation was used in the previous blog entitled: Diverging Bar Charts – Plotting Variance with ggplot2.
Gary Hutson
May 24, 2018
 
The :: operator
R tips
Most of the functionality in R comes from additional packages that you load. Sometimes two packages will have a function with the same name but they will do different…
Emma Vestesson
May 21, 2018
 
R studio shortcuts
R tips
I love keyboard shortcuts. I work in R studio and using keyboard shortcuts has saved me a lot of time. There is a full list of short cuts and I have pulled together my three…
Emma Vestesson
May 21, 2018
 
Importing and exporting Data
R tips
This blog originally appeared in http://gastrodatascience.com
S Zeki
May 15, 2018
 
The joy of R
Reflections
Public Health
Hello. My name is Julian and I am an R addict. I got hooked about 3 years ago when I took on a new role in Public Health England developing a public health data science…
Julian Flowers
Apr 9, 2018

Pareto Chart in ggplot2
R tips
ggplot2
base R
A Pareto chart, named after Vilfredo Pareto, is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by…
Gary Hutson
Mar 24, 2018
 
Aiming for a wrangle-free (or reduced) world
Reflections
I work as a Data Scientist at Public Health England. I am part of a small team that have a role in trying to modernise how we “do” data. I have been an analyst in one way or…
Sebastian Fox
Mar 23, 2018
 
NHS meets R
NHS-R
Hello and welcome to our nascent NHS-R Community; a community dedicated to promoting the learning, application and utilisation of R in the National Health Service (NHS) in…
Mar 19, 2018
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