NHS-R Committee Meeting
1 February 2024
Via Teams
Attendees: Zoë Turner (Chair), Bianca O’Mahoney (Notes), Prajwal Khairnar, Thomas Jemmett, Mia Hatton, Neil Bray, Pablo Leon Rodenas, Lynda Howard, Anastasiia Zharinova, Paul Johnson, Ben Murch
- Venue: The ICC has now been approved and booked for the NHS-R Conference in November 2024.\
- Purpose and focus: the Committee to continue to discuss. Action: ZT to follow up actions arising.
- Workshops and webinars: an exciting and varied programme of events is coming together with new workshops being organised along with Intro courses.
- The notes of the meeting on 18 January were agreed as an accurate record and all were happy for them to be made public.
- Thank you to AZ for agreeing to assist with social media communications for the conference.
- It will be important to ensure communications are effective and reach all who will be interested in attending.\
- Save the date to be shared on social media. Action: ZT/AZ/BO’M
- Share the date with the Data Science Community. Action: MH
- A summary of the statements made on the website, Fosstodon and the NHS-R Way book is included as an annex. These are based on ZT’s post on Slack.\
- In discussion, the following points were made:
- Purpose and focus were discussed at Unconference in 2023 (important to acknowledge that this type of open discussion leads to different interpretations by different listeners.) The purpose and focus were discussed but no formal notes were taken.
- The NHS part of the branding is strong and gives credibility. It also assists NHS staff when talking to their management (for example attending conference/training).
- Distinction between it being a community and a professional body and/or a challenger group rather than an authority group.\
- The name “NHS-R” can be confused with NHS Resolution. There is a risk of being told to cease and desist using “NHS” if there is a commercial aspect. Changing the logo/branding could take time for people to acknowledge.
- Merging with any other group like NHS.Pycom has been mooted but discussion of this topic has not been taken forward to either Committee.
- Is a new purpose required or should the original of “promoting the use of R in healthcare” remain and we acknowledge differing interpretations within that including the use of “more than” NHS and R.
- Summary sentences are good but it goes a bit deeper as a mission to promote, providing training, being part of community, people can volunteer and so on. Maybe look to go deeper in a paragraph to say more. Interest in open data science type tools such as GitHub and Python but the focus is on R.
- The whole essence of R is open and sharing.
- Acknowledged that as the Federated Data Platform is being rolled out to Trusts so Python could become the more dominant language.
- Agreed to continue to discuss and consider a guided session in the future.
- Still under discussion as part of the purpose discussion, particularly on including Python talks as has occurred over the last couple of years.
- AV quotes have been received – discuss at next meeting.
Future funding: the current funding stream from The Health Foundation will finish in financial year 2024/25. Any assistance with proposals / ideas for future funding / bid proposals from the Community would be welcomed and these can be focussed towards events like conferences.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Action | Owner | Status | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Purpose and function - pull together existing communications around the purpose. | Zoe Turner | Posted on Slack | | | | | | | | On-going discussion by Committee | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Terms of reference - circulate Government Data Science Community ToR as a starting point. | Zoe Turner | In progress | | | | | | | | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Take forward statistical analysis of social media stats | Paul Johnson | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Future meetings – send invitations for fortnightly meetings from January 2023 | Zoe Turner | Complete | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Conference: | | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Communications – take lead on social media comms for Conference including a Save the Date | Anastasiia Zharinova | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+ | Save the Date announcement to go to Data Science Community | Mia Hatton | | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------+------------------------------------+
The NHS-R Community started in 2018 to promote the use of R in the NHS and the community has grown rapidly ever since. It is a community that is broader than the NHS as members come from public sector organisations across the UK, including Local Authorities and Civil Service, as well as academics and voluntary sector people who have an interest in healthcare. Whilst R is a core language for support by the community, there is always support for data science tools more generally, particularly where they cross over with R
Promoting the Use of R in the UK Health and Care System Supports the learning, application and use of R and data science tools in the health and care system in the UK.
The NHS-R Community started in 2018 to promote the use of R in the NHS and the community has grown rapidly ever since. It is a community that is broader than the NHS as members come from public sector organisations across the UK, including Local Authorities and Civil Service, as well as academics and voluntary sector people who have an interest in healthcare. Whilst R is a core language for support by the community, there is always support for data science tools more generally, particularly where they cross over with R.
To support the learning, application and exploitation of R in the NHS and care system The absence of R at scale in the NHS, means that the NHS is unable to take advantage of the huge benefits of R including a worldwide R community which freely shares learning and resources.
NHS-R Way book Our goal is to promote R - extended to data science tools - and to do this in an open way by supporting and promoting open code sharing which includes other media content like videos of our workshops.
Our contributors come from Local Authorities, Civil Service, Public Sector, Academia, Voluntary Sector, charities and as individuals with no organisational connection.
A community of UK based analysts and data scientists working with health and social care data. We use open source tools and we share code at https://github.com/nhs-r-community
The NHS-R Community started in 2018 to promote the use of R in the NHS and the community has grown rapidly ever since. It is a community that is broader than the NHS as members come from public sector organisations across the UK, including Local Authorities and Civil Service, as well as academics and voluntary sector people who have an interest in healthcare. Whilst R is a core language for support by the community, there is always support for data science tools more generally, particularly where they cross over with R.