A couple of months back I talked at the launch of the Trial series on the Stepped Wedge Designed, on which I have worked together with a number of colleagues at UCL and LSHTM. Jennifer, who’s one of the authors of the series and is doing her PhD on this topic, has also posted on the LSTHM blog to report her impressions of the day (all of which I agree with, apart from the typo in spelling my name!).

Related to this, we are getting very close to also releasing our R package SWSamp (I know $-$ the page is empty at the moment, but we’re working on it…). This basically started when we were working on our SW paper and back the code was fairly specific to my immediate objective (simulation-based sample size calculations for a SW trial). I think this is kind of obvious, may be, certainly it happens all the time with me $-$ even BCEA has had a very similar inception and then development into something that is a lot more structured.

However, I think now I’ve become much better at writing R code (NB: this doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve become good at that $-$ just much better than, for example, when I started writing BCEA) and so I think we’re including a lot more functionalities in SWSamp. For example, we’re working to have very generic functions that can handle simulation based sample size calculations for many types of designs $-$ so kind of over and above the SWT.

We should be able to have some beta-release out very soon!