11  Public Health Profiles (England and Wales)

Commonly referred to as Fingertips, Public Health data can be found through the dashboard with a comprehensive page of links to guidance, features and methods/technical briefings: https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/guidance/supporting-information/ph-methods.

This is also available through APIs in R (not through CRAN):

{fingertipsR} and useful cheatsheet

Does not go down to LSOA level, only MSOA so cannot be used to find IMD scores.

Static Reports including life expectancy, best start in life, smoking, obesity, alcohol, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, cancer, musculoskeletal health, mental health and wellbeing and wider determinants of health.

11.0.1 R code to install

{remotes} is a package that is needed to install from GitHub so is commented out as it’s installed once:

# install.packages("remotes") 
remotes::install_github("rOpenSci/fingertipsR",
                        build_vignettes = TRUE,
                        dependencies = "suggests")

Note that the example code in the README for this package is base R so may not looks and works different to {tidyverse} coding. Base R and {tidyverse} do work together though and some code may mix the two approaches to coding.

and Python:

fingertips_py

11.1 Charts

11.1.1 R packages

  • {fingertipscharts} helps users to easily reproduce charts from Fingertips data.
  • {PHEindicatormethods} supports execution of statistical methods approved for use in the production of PHE indicators such as those presented via Fingertips.
  • {FunnelPlotR} - produces funnel plots with adjustments for over dispersion methods.

11.1.2 Examples of visualisations

Examples of visualisations that use Public Health data can be found at Trafford Data Lab with code open on GitHub.

11.1.3 Webinars/Workshops

An introduction to Public Health England’s packages, fingertipsR and fingertipscharts

Building R packages for your analytical pipeline - using {fingertipsR}, {PHEindicatormethods}, {fingertipscharts} and {phecharts}.

Using R to automate the generation of performance matrixes from Fingertips

PHINE Network meeting A worked example of how to use the phe_dsr() function from the {PHEindicatormethods} R package - A run through some of methods you can use to load data into Power BI - Loading using an API connection - NOMIS

11.2 Technical Briefings

Technical briefings from Apho (Association of Public Health Observatories) are available as downloadable pdfs which Scotland Public Health Observatory have compiled in one page along with their published guidance.

Methodology covered includes:

  • Standardisation
  • Confidence Intervals
  • Process Control charts
  • Health Inequalities
  • Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy
  • Developing indicators
  • Target setting
  • Health Inequalities Impact Assessment
  • Small area modelled (or synthetic) estimates