KIND network update
Week beginning Mon 9th September 2024
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our regular KIND network update. We’re starting our new Power BI for Beginner’s course next week. That’s an adaptation of our existing Power BI course to use the web version of Power BI, which I hope will improve some of the Power BI licencing issues that some learners have faced. Hope to see you there 10.00-12.00 this coming Thursday.
We also have a couple of spaces available on our EBM introductory course running weekly Wednesdays 14.00-16.00 from September 11th until October 9th. Please get in touch if you’d like one of the available slots.
Finally, we’ll be scheduling training sessions for November and December next week. Please get in touch ASAP if you’d like some training for your team. We can potentially offer any of our multi-session courses or any of our one-off sessions to you and your team free of charge. All that we ask is that you can commit to having 15-20 staff attend the sessions, and that you can take care of any admin and infrastructure requirements such as circulating invites, installing software etc.
Hope to see you at something soon
Brendan
Wins of The Week
In the spirit of #IAmRemarkable, we do a weekly wins of the week thread to celebrate the professional (and personal) achievements of the community. A random selection from last week:
- Accepted a new job offer despite it being a bit of a gamble. Feeling Big and Brave and trying not to feel irresponsible and foolish.
- For the last ~6 months I have been trying to organise a training course with an external partner, and this week we were able to finalise the cohort and kick off the welcome session, all using technology that is permitted by our health board.
- Put my excel training to good use and successfully helped a staff member who reached out for help. Set time aside and studied for an upcoming exam not leaving it to last minute!
- Personal win - getting new external doors installed at home that will actually fit, not let in draughts and are not metal, so no more burnt skin in the sunshine. Happy Friday :-)”
Training sessions
| Session | Date | Area | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| References and names in Excel | 09:30-10:30 Tue 10th September 2024 | Excel | 🌶 :beginner-level |
| R from scratch (session 2) | 14:30-15:30 Tue 10th September 2024 | R | 🌶 :beginner-level |
| BI for beginners (service version, session 1) | 10:00-12:00 Thu 12th September 2024 | Power BI | 🌶 :beginner-level |
Events
- 3-4pm, Mon 9th September 2024. All welcome at the Community Meetup - our regular Monday get-together/webinar/tech demo. Full details and joining links via the community meetup channel. The theme this week is joins again, with the second of three sessions on the topic. This session will concentrate on core joins used in practice - left, right, full, anti, etc. We’ll do a bit of introduction and chat, and then show how these can be implemented in a range of platforms - hopefully Excel, Power Query, R, and SQL.
- 1-2pm, Tue 10th September 2024. The Scottish Community of Data Analysts is a community of practice for those working with data in territorial NHS Boards. Next week, the presenter will be Julie Arnot and Martin Taulbut (PHS) - Child Poverty Indicators.
Book of the week
Daniel Kahneman. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow.
ISBN 9780141033570, Worldcat.
This week’s book of the week was suggested by Liz Elliott, a Senior Analyst at NHS Education for Scotland, who writes: ’this very popular bestselling book discusses cognitive biases and why humans are generally bad at assessing risk and interpreting statistics. Some of the research cited in the book was found to be unsound and Kahneman himself said ‘I placed too much faith in underpowered studies’. Its an interesting read particularly with that in mind..