Introductory data skills
- This is an early-stage draft of a complex course
- Structure matters for this sort of course, and the structure is as yet unsettled
- Please treat this material as completely fallible and potentially misleading
Course overview
This is a seven-session beginners course in data work.
- The data journey
- Distributions
- Datafy your system
- Measure, collect, and structure your data
- Summarise and compare
- Visualise and communicate
- Interpreting other people’s data
About this course
This course gives you an introduction to thinking with data in health and care. The course focuses on using data to answer real questions about the services and systems you work in. Whether you want to understand how busy a service is, how things are changing, or what your local population needs, this course gives you the tools to explore those questions using information you can count and compare. Through gaining a mixture of knowledge and skills, this course should make you confident in your use of data, giving you the confidence to ask important questions, to notice when numbers do not add up, and to avoid having the wool pulled over your eyes by statistics used without context.
Across these sessions, we will cover how data is collected, how to organise it using tools like Excel, how simple statistics help us summarise and compare information, understand how graphs and other data visualisations might be useful, and think about the best ways that data might be communicated. We aim to be as non-technical as possible, so don’t expect to find lots of coding content, material about data architecture, or detailed statistical work here. We know that there are lots of different stages of data maturity in different organisations, so that aim for this introductory course is to keep the specific technical content to a minimum. I think that means everything here could be done with paper and pencil if needed, so hopefully you’ll be able to take this content and apply it to your work no matter where you are. During the sessions, we’ll use Microsoft Excel for some of the demonstrations and practicals, so please make sure you have your basic Excel skills in-hand (our beginners course would be more than adequate for this).
This course is oriented towards our health and social care audience, which means that we’ll try to work with real-looking data to answer real-looking questions. For example, we might want to answer such questions as:
- Is our hospital busier than it was last year?
- Do we have proportionally more children than average in our town?
- How many people are currently homeless in Scotland?
- Are care home residents in our area experiencing more falls than in similar areas?
The course will run in a positive, supportive, and practical learning environment, with opportunities to learn from colleagues’ experiences across services. Sessions are deliberately not recorded to create a space where people can ask questions openly and explore ideas without pressure.
By the end, you will be able to use data to provide clear, practical answers, understand the limitations of those answers, ask better questions, and communicate your findings confidently to others.
Acknowledgements
Ian Douglas (NHS Highland) for basically summing up the whole course in an email. Maria McAllister (HIS) and Kristi Long (NES) for changing the way we defined data in this course. Kenneth Mack (HIS) for probing on the difference between data and information. Gail Gibbs (NHS Lanarkshire) for starting off the five questions about data line of work. Judi Evans (PHS) for overall feedback. Catherine McGrenera (NHS 24) for pressing the importance of storytelling with data. Zoe Turner (Strategy Unit) for showing why we need to start with data-fying. Ailsa King (NHS GGC) and John Rankin (PHS) for thinking about communication.