Courses

Training courses and workshops

A one-day course aimed at information analysts who need to put together written or spoken narratives to accompany their data. The course covers short-form scenarios (one side of A4 if it's a written document; a two-minute slot at a meeting if it's a spoken word thing) and longer-form scenarios (multi-page documents and 10-minute presentations).

Flow_ology is a one-day workshop for NHS data analysts that shows how to re-visualize data about emergency care. It's about taking patient flow seriously: how we describe patient flow, how we understand patient flow, how we go about fixing patient flow.

Flowopoly combines game-style replays (with boards on tables representing hospital wards and credit-card-sized cards representing individual patients) with group exercises that involve looking at data to work out the 'ought-to-be' numbers associated with a high-functioning unscheduled care system.

FlowStories is a one-day workshop that uses the power of individual patient stories to demonstrate the human impact of improved patient flow. We're all agreed that we need to use data in our attempt to improve patient flow. But that data is often too high-level, too abstract, too general for people to see the relevance of it for patient care. FlowStories positions individual patient experience centrestage in the way we bring data to bear on patient flow.

Health Service SPC is a one-day course that shows analysts (and Excel-literate managers) how to create run charts and control charts from scratch using raw data, how to decide which control chart is the most appropriate for the given scenario, how to understand the interpretation rules and how to explain the finished data exhibit to NHS audiences.

Lots of us jump straight from data analysis to data visualization. We don't stop to think about whether we're choosing the right visualization for the decision-making situation we find ourselves in. We don't consider if we're using a visual metaphor that will work for our intended audience. This is a course that provides you with a checklist for thinking more 'systematically' about information design, and how we can use the design of our data exhibits to connect more effectively to our audience's way of thinking.

This is a one day training course for NHS data analysts who are completely new to R. The course is taught assuming that you know nothing (or virtually nothing) about R but you want to know how to make R a part of your workflow.

A one day training course for NHS data analysts who already have a very basic familiarity with R. We assume that you've used the key functions in dplyr and that you've created some basic charts in ggplot2 but you now want to develop your R skills that little bit more.

A one-day course for information analysts that presents a checklist of four broad chart types to go through each time you're faced with a visualization task: distributions, time series, margins of error, relationships. The course also teaches a core statistical skill with each checklist element, showing how to do the calculations and visualizations in Microsoft Excel.