HealthyR Ghana! Quick summary

These past two days are new frontier for the HealthyR course, taking the number of continents we’ve run it in up to 2.After the NIHR Unit on Global Surgery meeting, we travelled to Tamale, Ghana’s third largest city. The Wellcome Trust have kindly funded the development of the innovative, open-source HealthyR notebooks course. Spearheaded by Dr Riinu Ots, this course aims to provide an easy way for anyone in the world to learn R.This is particularly powerful where resources are limited and there are plenty of questions that need to be answered. Enter Stephen Tabiri, professor of Surgery at the University for Development Studies in Tamale. Stephen is as surgeon and has a large team of junior surgeons in training, nurses and other clinicians.In an innovative twist, it was held on a mix of laptops, from the data centre and on delegates own machines. Riinu had a brilliant solution, that served an offline R studio instance to delegates computers.Day 1 quickly introduced some key concepts to the delegates who quickly worked through the materials! After lunch a global surgery showcase event was held, which showcased the wide range of tools available to analyse data in R!Day 2 kicked off nicely, completing the basics session and then straight into everyone’s favourite session – Plotting! Here there were a lot of pleased delegates as they made complicated and colourful ggplots! People were making a lot of progress, in what can sometimes be a challenging language to learn!We finally closed on a logistic regression session delivered by Ewen Harrison, where people built their own models!Throughout the course there were numerous people bringing laptops to install RStudio software on their own desktops. A very enthusiastic and keen bunch of data scientists!Excitingly, members of the Ghana R community also attended, to offer support and discuss how best to provide a sustainable future for data science in Ghana.

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