NEWS – Health Service Modelling Associates training opportunity
The Health Service Modelling Associates (HSMA) Programme is an initiative in which staff working in health, social care and policing organisations can access free online training in modelling, simulation and AI techniques targeted at their applications areas. Staff are released for a day a week for 1 year. In the first 3 months, they receive 140 hours of live online training. They then pitch project ideas that use their new skills to tackle an issue of importance for their organisation. Selected projects receive 9 months of mentoring support from expert modelling and data science academics and practitioners. Previous HSMA projects have led to £multi-million investments in new services, and significant career progression for those taking part.
The programme teaches skills in :
– Python and R programming (no prior knowledge of programming required)
– Discrete Event Simulation using SimPy for modelling pathway and queuing problems
– Network Analysis and System Dynamics for modelling whole systems
– Geographic modelling and visualisation techniques for dealing with location issues
– Cellular Automata and Agent Based Simulation using MESA for modelling behaviour
– Artificial Intelligence approaches, such as Machine Learning to teach machines to make decisions, and Natural Language Processing to extract information from free text data
– Forecasting methods to make predictions about the future
All the approaches taught are completely Free and Open Source.
HSMA 4 launches in October 2021 and, for the first time ever, is open to anyone working in health, social care or policing organisations anywhere in England. If you’re interested in the programme, you can find out more about it here : https://bit.ly/3oyzrmt. To register your interest in HSMA 4, and be notified when applications open in June, you should complete the short online form here : http://bit.ly/HSMA4mail.
In addition, if you are an existing Operational Research or Data Science academic or practitioner, and would be interested in accessing the training and then providing mentoring support in the programme, please also register your interest at the link above.
New content added – 26th January 2021
You will find new content on advanced plotting with ggplot2, distribution fitting with fitdistrplus and web app development with shiny. In addition to what is available on this site, the GitLab repository have been updated with all of the new materials. There are are also two tutorial videos available on YouTube
- Getting to grips with R – An introduction covering most of the basic functionality
- Advanced R – covering ggplot2, distribution fitting and shiny
Hello and welcome to the R for healthcare website. This site contains an ever growing set of training materials relevant for the use of the R language by people working in and around healthcare.
This set of resources is something that healthcare analysts will find particularly useful as it will provide you with the skills required to undertake and automate those analytics tasks you would normally do in spreadsheet programmes such as Excel.
If you have any suggestions for training topics or feedback on the site content please use the contact form which can be found here
Introductory presentation
Download the presentation here
The introductory presentation contains information about:
- What is R?
- Uses of R
- Downloading and installing R
- Downloading and installing R Studio
- Familiarisation with the R Studio environment
- Packages and their uses
- R programming conventions
Training contents
The NHS-R Community
Do you work in a health or social care related organisation? Do you use or are interested in using R in your work? If the answer to these questions is yes then you should head on over to the NHS-R Community website to find out more. Find a whole community of people learning and using R in the NHS together.
R for healthcare 