Useful links

Here are a few places you can find more information and support when implementing RAP.

Strategic

• The Government Analysis Function's RAP strategy details the roles we all have to play in working towards RAP.
• The ONS have also published their RAP Strategy Implementation Plan 2023
• Other government department RAP implementation plans
• The Goldacre Review mentions RAP extensively as a key tool in improving the use of patient data.
• The Bennett Institute of Applied Data Science has written a helpful summary that is helpful for understanding the above documents in the context of UK data policy developments.

Guidance and Standards

• The AQUA book of analytical standards.
• The ONS best practice team have a useful website - often called the Quack book covering many of the same topics we cover here. Their best-practice checklist is particularly useful.
• The Turing Institute's The Turing Way handbook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science
• We have taken inspiration from the NHS Digital software engineering COP.
• The Health RAP Playbook, currently in alpha testing, contains specific advice on doing RAP in a healthcare setting.
• NHS PyCom Coding Club Github: Lots of great guides and lessons here from the NHS Python Community
• Building reproducible analytical pipelines with R

Examples, Challenges, Benefits

• This blog post, from 2017, explains the context and history of RAP in government statistics.
• The GSS's list of benefits that come from RAP.
• The Statistics Authority's excellent report on overcoming barriers to RAP adoption.
• Alston, J. M., and Rick, J. A.. 2020. A Beginner's Guide to Conducting Reproducible Research. Bull Ecol Soc Am 102(2):e01801.
• The GSS training portal offers an Introduction to RAP course
• The Government Analysis Function conducted research on the rollout of RAP across different departments.

Community spaces

• There are several communities to discuss Python, R and Git in the Health and Public sectors:
• Government Data Science community (website | slack #rap_collaboration | GitHub)
  • Government Analysis Function RAP Champion network (website)
• NHS Python Community (NHS-pycom) (website | slack | GitHub | Coding Club)
• NHS R Community (website | slack |GitHub)
• AnalystX (website | Future NHS - AnalystX | GitHub)
• We have an NHS England "RAP Community of Practice" MS Teams (internal to NHS England - contact us @ data.science@nhs.net)
• NHS Digital Github
• Our very own NHS England RAP Community of Practice

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Last update: November 11, 2024

External Links Disclaimer

NHS England makes every effort to ensure that external links are accurate, up to date and relevant, however we cannot take responsibility for pages maintained by external providers.

NHS England is not affiliated with any of the websites or companies in the links to external websites.

If you come across any external links that do not work, we would be grateful if you could report them by raising an issue on our RAP Community of Practice GitHub.