RAP in Public Health: Where we’ve come and where we’re going

• RSS International Conference 2025
• 11:30 - 12:50 Thursday, 4th September, 2025

Presentations

• Breaking it up: our approach to RAP Georgina Anderson, Department of Health and Social Care

• Automating Hospital Mortality Analytics: A Case Study in Reproducible Reporting at Public Health Scotland, Cemre Su Lode & Mridula Nair, Public Health Scotland

• A practical perspective on adopting RAP tooling for winter hospital pressures forecasting, Jack Kennedy, UK Health Security Agency

• How does working reproducibly change how teams work?, Rosemary Walmsley, Public Health Wales

• Panel session notes

Resources

• NHS R Community

• Public Health RAP drop-ins

Session abstract

Since 2017, analysts in the UK public sector have made their analysis more efficient and reproducible using a methodology called Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP). They advocate writing analysis as code and using open-source tools, version control software, and dependency management. The Goldacre Review (2022) emphasised the importance of RAP in public health, and now seems like a good time to reflect on where we’ve come, showcase some of the good work done so far and share some advice and knowledge for future work.

This session brings together a number of analysts from across public health to share stories of how they have incorporated RAP principals in their working practices and the benefits it has brought.

The session will conclude with a 20 minute RAP clinic where our panelists will answer questions around the future of RAP.