The NHS is one of the UK’s most valued institutions and serves as the healthcare infrastructure for millions of people. Mango has had the pleasure of supporting their internal NHS-R community over the last few years, supporting the initiative from its inception and sharing our knowledge and expertise at their events as they seek to promote the wider usage and adoption of R and develop best practice solutions to NHS problems.

According to a recent survey by Udemy, 62% of organisations are focusing on closing skills gaps, essential to keeping teams competitive, up to date and armed with the relevant skills to adapt to future challenges.  For many institutions, an important first step is connecting their analytics teams and data professionals to encourage the collaboration and sharing of knowledge. With ‘Data literacy’ fast becoming the new computer literacy, workforces with strong data skills are fast realising the strength and value of such skills across the whole organisation.

As the UK’s largest employer, comprising 207 clinical commissioning groups, 135 acute non-specialist trusts and 17 acute specialist trusts in England alone, the NHS faces a particularly daunting task when it comes to connecting their data professionals, a vast group which includes clinicians as well as performance, information and health analysts.

The NHS-R community was the brainchild of Professor Mohammed Mohammed, Principal Consultant (Strategy Unit), Professor of Healthcare, Quality & Effectiveness at the University of Bradford. He argues,  “I’m pretty sure there is enough brain power in NHS to tackle any analytical challenge, but what we have to do is harness that power, promoting R as the incredible tool that it is, and one that can enable the growing NHS analytics community to work collaboratively, rather than in silos”.

Three years in and the NHS-R Community has begun to address that issue, bringing together once disparate groups and individuals to create a community, sharing insights, use cases, best practices and approaches, designed to create better outputs across the NHS with a key aim of improving patient outcomes.  Having delivered workshops at previous NHS-R conferences, Mango consultants were pleased to support the most recent virtual conference with two workshops – An Introduction to the Tidyverse and Text Analysis in R. These courses proved to be a popular choice with the conference attendees, attracting feedback such as “The workshop has developed my confidence for using R in advanced analysis” and “An easy to follow and clear introduction to the topic.”

Liz Mathews, Mango’s Head of Community, has worked with Professor Mohammed from the beginning, sharing information and learnings from our own R community work and experience.  Professor Mohammed commented:

“The NHS-R community has, from its very first conference, enjoyed support from Mango who have a wealth of experience in using R for government sector work and great insight in how to develop and support R based communities. Mango hosts the annual R in Industry conference (EARL) to which NHS-R Community members are invited and from which we have learned so much. We see Mango as a friend and a champion for the NHS-R Community.”

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