May news 2025
A news roundup of events and activities in NHS-R Community and beyond
Foreword from Chris Beeley, Head of Data Science at The Strategy Unit and NHS-R Project Director
Welcome to another NHS-R newsletter summarising all the latest developments in the world of open source data science in NHS-R and across health and care. Zoë Turner is currently on secondment away from the Strategy Unit and so Claire Welsh (who has recently joined the data science team at the Strategy Unit) is the new project lead for NHS-R- ably assisted by the fabulous Caileigh Solomenca and Chris Beeley (that's me!). Feel free to contact any one of us via Slack or any other means at your disposal if you would like to talk about the NHS-R community any time. Zoë has done a brilliant job as lead for NHS-R including running a brilliant conference last year so Claire has big shoes to fill- but Claire is already a valuable member of the community and I'm sure she will do a great job.
NHS-R Community Activity Round-Up
❓ NHS-R Community Questionnaire 2025
We recently ran a community-wide questionnaire with the aim of getting a broad understanding of how our resources are used, and our worth to our participants. We had an excellent response to this, thanks in part to our offer of the chance to win one of two £25 Amazon vouchers for those who completed the questionnaire (winners will be picked soon and emailed). A big THANK YOU to those who took part! The questionnaire is now closed, and its results will be publicised in due course. If you missed the opportunity to get involved, and would like to let us know how NHS-R helps you or provide feedback on how we could improve, feel free to contact us at nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net – we’d love to hear from you!
🎓 Fellowships
We have recently streamlined our Fellowships offer and processes. Those interested in having your contributions to the community publicly recognised, please consider self-nominating! Details on how to apply and the criteria used for adjudication can be found in the NHS-R Way book.
📦 New package!
The fabulous Chris Mainey (NHS-R Committee member and Fellow) published the {NHSRwaitinglist} package on CRAN in late April. The package contains a suite of functions designed to make it simpler for NHS analysts to adopt best practice methods for the analysis of their own waiting lists. Huge congratulations Chris!
We now have three NHS-R packages hosted on CRAN, which is a testament to their quality, and they’ve jointly been downloaded in the region of 47.5K times!!
Training 🚂
We are continuing to run our Introduction to R and RStudio and Intermediate R courses, thanks to our incredible volunteer and committee member Simon Wellesley-Miller. This training is a gentle introduction to using R, with loads of support and guidance. All our training materials are provided free of charge and are publicly available on our GitHub. Feel free to download and use these however you see fit, and please consider offering to host or co-host one of these training sessions in future! You will be fully supported to do so, and it is an excellent way to improve your own understanding while giving back to the community. For more details, see the NHS-R Way book.
New blogs! ✍
Come and check out our blogs section of the NHS-R website, where we have two new entries; one on predictive analytics and one on community building! Please do consider writing a blog for the website - you could write about some cool work you’ve done, about your journey with R, the NHS or anything in between!
Events 2025
What does my membership allow me to attend?
Please be advised that attendance at workshops is restricted to Core members only. However, note that it is very rare for a webinar to be restricted to core members only unless requested. The RPYSOC conference is open to everyone.
Core membership is available to all employees of the NHS, public sector, civil service, voluntary sector, charities and academia. Any restricted ticket event will be restricted to all or mostly Core membership tickets.
RAP drop-ins 😎
Our host organisation The Strategy Unit has taken over offering NHS-wide Reproducible Analytical Pipelined (RAP) Drop-In sessions from the excellent but over-worked NHSE team who previously led them. These sessions will run in Teams, fortnightly to begin with, and offer a space to come and chat to a couple of our data scientists about all things RAP: across R, python, Git, GitHub and all such things. Keep an eye out for registration links! The first session is due to be held on 21st May (register here), staffed by Chris Beeley and Claire Welsh.
To ask a question before the session, take a look at our brand new RAP Drop In repository Discussion section! We will aim to answer any questions posted here during the drop in and summarise our responses in the repo discussion afterwards, to keep a record of answers and in case you can’t make it to the drop in on the day. Feel free to upvote other people’s questions that you’d like answered also!
GitHub Discussions is a place where you can ask questions and join the discussion if you want. The fortnightly meet-ups will always be available for you to ask questions if you'd rather do it in person, or you can email us at mlcsu.su.datascience@nhs.net. We're using GitHub to help develop the community because version control is central to the RAP lifestyle and GitHub is the most popularly-used tool for this purpose in the public sector.
Coffee and Coding ☕
Do you have an interesting piece of code/work you would like to share with the NHS-R Community? Would you like help with some code you are currently working on? Is there an opportunity for collaboration that you would like to share? We would love to hear from you at our Coffee and Coding session!
To sign-up for the Coffee and Coding sessions, please visit the NHS-R Community website.
If you have code, a piece of work or project and/or an opportunity for collaboration that you would like to discuss, please contact us via the NHS-R Community inbox (nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net).
You can watch previous Coffee and Coding sessions via our YouTube Channel!
Webinars 📽
We are very excited to announce that the NHS-R Community will be hosting the following online webinar during May 2025:
Complexity Made Approachable: Rethinking R-Based Modelling for Healthcare with AM-Smart Tools with Brian Castellani, Corey Schimpf and Chris Caden
Date: Thursday 22nd May 2025
Time: 13:00 – 14:00 (UK time)
Registration link: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/f9f9c905-6ae4-4c6f-b32f-52f15db4378b@f47807cf-afbc-4184-a579-8678bea3019a
Please note that NHS-R Community webinars are free to all.
Workshops 👷♀️
We have some fabulous workshops currently in the process of being scheduled. Watch this space!
Volunteers!
We are seeking volunteers to host/co-host webinars and/or workshops throughout the year. This is a fantastic opportunity to share your knowledge and skills whilst building a community of practice for data analysis and data science using open-source software. It also counts towards your evidence for application for Fellow status!
If you would like to volunteer, please email the NHS-R Community inbox (nhs.rcommunity@nhs.net) or sign-up via the volunteer form posted on the NHS-R Community Slack.
If you would like to recommend someone within your network to contact, please email the NHS-R Community inbox or drop us a message via LinkedIn.
Please note that additional information regarding the NHS-R Community, workshops and webinars can be found on the NHS-R Community website and NHS-R Community Way book.
Upcoming Conferences from other communities
R/Med JUNE 9-13 virtual
“The R/Medicine conference provides a forum for sharing R based tools and approaches used to analyze and gain insights from health data.”
useR! AUGUST 8-10 hybrid
“useR! 2025 brings together R users, developers, and enthusiasts from around the world for three days of tutorials, presentations, and networking. The conference is aimed at beginners as well as experienced users.”
Posit SEPTEMBER 16-18 hybrid
“Learn, grow, and connect with a global community of data scientists at our annual data science conference.”
Shiny in production OCTOBER 8-9 in person (Newcastle)
“Hosted in the centre of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, this conference will delve into the world of {shiny} and other web-focused R packages. Whether you’re a seasoned {shiny} user who wants to network and share knowledge, someone who’s just getting started and wants to learn from the experts, or anybody in between, if you’re interested in {shiny}, this conference is for you.”
EARL OCTOBER 14-16 in person (Brighton)
“The EARL Tech Conference (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) is a cross-sector event focused on the commercial use of R and Python, held in Brighton, UK.”
Let’s Talk Digital OCTOBER 23-24 in person (Gloucestershire)
“The Let’s Do Digital team is proud to announce the 2025 Let’s Talk Digital Conference, with an important theme of education in digital healthcare. We have an amazing line of of speakers and chairs, who will provide you with a range of exciting and educational case studies and also great innovation learnings from the frontline.”
Featured in other newsletters/websites
Getting the message out about NHS-R Community is an ongoing task and we are always on the lookout for places to promote our events. Here are a couple of new places you’ll see us and feel free to share/let us know of other places we should be:
RSS DS + AI Section Newsletter
Turing Way Newsletter and Turing Way site
AnalystX on FutureNHS Platform (signing in required)
Posit Quarto Website Gallery with links to our website
R package hexSticker Gallery we used the package for 4 stickers and added them to the readme Gallery (it’s alphabetical in order)
_brand.yml we have shared our brand guidelines in the Posit Gallery which can be used for reports, apps, dashboards and plots in Quarto, R and Python. We use the NHS England colours and hopefully the code should be clear enough to update the code for other nation’s colours and logos too.