Our RAP Service
Following the recommendations in the Overcoming Barriers to RAP report, we have set up a central RAP team to coordinate efforts and set standards across NHS Digital.
This team tends to be made up of about 5 data scientists and we flex the resource up and down according to demand.
Over time, we hope that the central RAP team can be resourced with a mix of all kinds of roles in NHS England. We think that this collaborative approach to resourcing will make it more likely that the whole community owns the problem.
There are already lots of people playing an informal 'RAP champion' role by supporting colleagues. This group of people would be the natural candidates to guide the NHS England RAP community over time.
The rest of this section shares the resources our RAP team has developed for the management, planning, and strategy for embedding RAP practices in a large organisation. We hope that sharing our approach and considerations will help others.
NHS Digital rollout strategy
The single most valuable tool we have had in our work is the report from the ONS about overcoming barriers to RAP adoption. Almost every one of the considerations discussed in this report has been relevant for us in the past year.
We would strongly encourage organisations who want to adopt RAP practices to read this report and share with senior leaders. You might also consider running a pre-mortem with the project sponsor and senior analytical leaders to anticipate and avoid some of the problems mentioned in this report.
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.