RAP Community of Practice
This material is maintained by the NHS England RAP Community of Practice.
You can see some examples of our work here, including underlying code to NHS Digital publications which have been published as a direct outcome of the service our team provides.
These resources are intended for those interested in adopting Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP).
RAP is becoming the standard for creating analytical outputs in government; combining a number of ways of working that help to improve the reliability, transparency, and speed of statistics publications. Learn more on our Why RAP is important page.
RAP in the NHS
The Goldacre Review, tasked with finding ways to deliver better, broader, and safer use of NHS data for analysis and research, identified RAP as the essential element to ensure high-quality analysis.
The Data Science team at NHS England have been championing RAP practices and providing support for analytical teams across our organisation. We have published these resources in the spirit of openness and transparency, and in the hope that other teams in other organisations may find them useful. You can find out more about our incredible contributors on our Acknowledgements page.
Learn more about our RAP service.
Aims
This community of practice aims to support teams in adopting RAP practices through:
- Developing learning materials including reusable templates
- Offering support as teams establish new working practices
See more about our aims.
Tutorials and resources
As we work alongside teams at NHS England, we try to produce reusable learning materials. We try to avoid reproducing guidance that is easily available online. Instead, we link to lots of external resources where you can self-serve.
We also have created some bespoke guidance that lays out how you would accomplish these practices in the NHS England setting, which are available internally.
The 'Implementing RAP' section shows you how you can start using RAP principles within your own team such as using code reviews, publishing your code or useful tools.
We have also developed some training resources on:
Contribute
These resources are intended to help people get started with RAP. We welcome all feedback.
If you think of something worth including, improving, or want to contribute, please raise an issue on GitHub or contact the team via the NHS England "RAP Community of Practice" MS Teams (internal to NHS England), or email.
You can also follow our guidance on how to contribute.
Licence
Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT Licence. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.
This collection of resources is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.
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.