Training

HealthyR

NEW: Free HealthyR resources and independent training materials for learning R now at healthyr.surgicalinformatics.org

HealthyR: R for Healthcare Data Analysis is our amazing 2.5 day quick start course. This introduces healthcare researchers with no experience of using the industry-standard R computer coding language for data science. It takes an innovative approach, is delivered on our own servers, and uses code specially designed for education.

A book to accompany the course will be published by Chapman and Hall in future. Riinu was recently awarded Wellcome Trust Open Data award to develop “HealthyR Notebooks”. This software concept brings together training materials, analysis code, and data analysis results into one document. This is intuitive and coherent, is run entirely through a web browser, and will allow us to deliver this training in resource-poor environments. We have trialled this innovative teaching method Ghana (blog post 1, blog post 2).

GlobalSurg/NIHR Education and Training Platform

Katie runs the fantastic training.globalsurg.org our online learning environment. Yes, Moodle can be a bit of a pain, but this is now running well delivering trial specific training as well as stand-alone courses.  

We hope that by supporting training in our partner countries, we can contribute to capacity-building in surgery. We are delighted to have funded scholarships allowing training surgeons in NIHR Surgical Research Hubs to complete the MSc in Surgical Sciences as part of their formative research training (Ghana 4, Mexico 2, Rwanda 4, South Africa 2).

Edinburgh Surgery Online

Members of the team at the ESO Tutor Dinner 2019

ESO is home to the online programmes in surgery that we all contribute to. Cameron is also the ESO fellow, Katie supports the MSc, Riinu supports stats for them all, Tom&Kenny support stats on the MSc in Surgical Sciences, and Ewen is the Programme Director for the Masters in General Surgery (ChM).

There are now 500 students per year on these programmes, showing how popular and successful they are. We highly recommend them!

ShinyStats

We have created “ShinyStats”: a series of web-based interactive applications to aid teaching statistics. It is freely available for anyone with an internet connection to access at shinystats.org

Students are given already visualised sample data to interact with; for example, they can manipulate the number of observations. Each time an observation is altered, the application displays the p-value (an indicator of statistical significance). This level of experimentation gives the students a more thorough understanding of statistical concepts, benefitting not only their own research and analysis but also the ability to understand the results quoted in published medical literature.