NHS-R Community Datasets

Data sources for reuse

This package has been created to help NHS, Public Health and related analysts/data scientists learn to use R. It contains several free datasets, with documentation and many of the examples of the use can be found in the training materials from NHS-OA (formerly NHS-R Community).

We encourage contributions to the package, both to expand the set of training material, and also as development for newer R/github users as a first or early contribution.
Please add relevant free, open source data sets that you think may benefit the NHS-R Community.

Installation instructions

You can install the package from CRAN with R code:

install.packages("NHSRdatasets")

To install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pkg_install("nhs-r-community/NHSRdatasets")

Once installed go to the Get Started article from the [website](`vignette(“NHSRdatasets”) (the same link can be found on the top right of the GitHub Repository).

Datasets available

As this R package is static and does not use an API or any other code to dynamically provide information data can be accessed directly through GitHub from the .rda files which are stored in the data folder.

The code used to produce some of these .rda files has been included as vignettes. Note that some of this may be out of date or links are unavailable so this is included only for reference.

Contributing

Please see our guidance on how to contribute.

This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

When contributing a dataset, the contributor certifies that:

They are the data owner, or are authorised to republish the dataset in question.
The dataset does not contain real patient-level or any other sensitive data.
Where it is based on sensitive or patient data, the contributor takes full responsibility for sharing the data and certifies that it has been processed, anonymised, aggregated or otherwise protected in accordance with all legal requirements under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or other relevant legislation.

Citation

It’s great to see the NHSRdatasets package and data used as it promotes the work of the NHS-R Community so, where it’s relevant and makes sense, please give us a mention!

Users of the mortality dataset:

The data used to build the mortality dataset in this package is released under © Crown copyright and is free to use under the terms of the Open Government Licence. Any subsequent use should include a source accreditation to ONS to help people find the original releases and any statistical corrections that may have occurred since this was included in this package

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence.

Changes to NHS-R Community

All references in this package are to NHS-R Community, however, from 2025 NHS-R Community and NHS Pycom started a merge to become NHS Open Analytics. At the time of updating this package the current move to NHS Open Analytics is ongoing.

Contributors

_Zoë Turner 💻 📖 🚧	_Fran Barton 💻 🔣	_Rhian Davies 🚧	_Chris Mainey 💻	_Tom Jemmett 💻	_Cath Blatter 🐛	_{Martine Wauben} 📖
_Gary Hutson 🔣	_Jason Pott 📖	_{Jacqueline Grout} 🔣	_{Anya Ferguson} 🎨