R Training for Public Health Intelligence Analysts across Midlands & East

Public Health and prevention is a key part of the Midlands & East Transformation programme, that includes provision of R Training for Public Health Intelligence Analysts across Midlands and East.

The R training will have a specific focus on RMarkdown, starting from basics and working through aspects of automating Word, PDF and html documents for the presentation of public health intelligence and epidemiological analysis. Included in this will be the routine production of statistical profiles and reports with accompanying written analysis and interpretation.

Specific areas to be included in the R Training are as follows:

• inserting headers and subheaders
• importing images into documents
• inserting automated text such as “greater than” or “less than” based on values
• inserting tables and charts
• applying company templates and branding
• Cascading Style Sheets for use with html
• Latex for use with PDF

The training should also incorporate importing and manipulating data via Public Health England’s (PHE) fingertipsR package and applying methodologies contained within the PHEIndicatorMethods package. These packages can be found here:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/PHEindicatormethods/index.html
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fingertipsR/index.html

The training will be delivered to Public Health Analysts from East Midlands, West Midlands and the East of England. The training will be a one day course delivered three times to analysts in each of the areas (e.g. Birmingham, Nottingham, Cambridge).

The target audience will be Public Health intelligence analysts in a local authority setting who are already using R routinely, or at least have a grasp of the basics and have completed some of the free key modules within DataCamp.

The expectation is that the provider will offer HEE the benefits of:

• Experience from having delivered similar engagement work in the past
• Significant knowledge and experience of working with public health staff (at all levels)

The following are expected outcomes from this work:

Delivery of one-day course in R training to analysts in Birmingham, Cambridge and Nottingham with 15-20 people per session (3 days in March 2019) - 3 days
Production of final evaluation report to HEE to include recommendations for next steps - 1 day