The Stategy Unit were commissioned by Mersey Care NHS FT to create a model to estimate the surge in demand to Mental Health services caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on published evidence, SUS datasets (MHSDS, IAPT), and expert opinion we produced a System’s Dynamic’s Model in R. This model was then given a web user interface so people could interact with the model.

The code is released under an MIT license and is available on the SU GitHub, and the model is available to use here.

For the 2021 NHS-R conference I delivered a workshop on functional programming (slides, video) and a lightning talk on Object Orientated Programming in R using S3 (slides, video).

I also had the pleasure of helping out in two other workshops: “Reproducible computation at scale in R with {targets}” by Will Landau and an introduction to “Artificial Neural Networks in R with Keras and TensorFlow” by Leon Eyrich Jessen. Both of these sessions were fantastically informative and delivered expertly.

This is the 4^th^ NHS-R conference, and I have been lucky enough to attend all of them. Each year they get bigger and better, as can be seen by the incredible line up of speakers from this year (including stars like Prof. Frank Harrell and Julia Silge). I can’t wait for next years conference!

A number of individuals from the NHS-R community (Simon, Chris R, Chris M, Tom S, Zoe, and myself) collaborated to build an R package to implement the “Making Data Count” SPC rules and charts. The goal was to replicate the functionality provided in their excel tool.

We have just reached version 0.1.0 and published the package to CRAN. You can install it yourself by running

install.packages("NHSRplotthedots")

The documentation for the package is available here, and you can view the code on GitHub.