Data Science Community for Health and Care Newsletter June 2026
Welcome to the latest newsletter from the Data Science Community for Health and Care, brought to you by the NHS England Data Science Professional Development Functional Team.
The newsletter team are always happy to receive constructive feedback, and we invite you to send us any contributions you may have.
If you cannot access something of interest to you, please reach out.
Thanks for reading! – newsletter team
June Analyst X Data Science Huddle - DATE CHANGE
Tuesday 7th July 2026, 10:30 - 11:30, Online
The next Analyst X Data Science Huddle for June has been rearranged for Tuesday 7th July. We will here from one project; see the abstract below.
- Predicting Length of Stay: Explainable, Continuously Updated Discharge Forecasting to Reduce Overstays Presented by Adam Hollings
Estimated discharge dates (EDD) are often missing and, when present, are frequently inaccurate — even when predicting discharge within the next 24 hours. This lack of reliability reduces staff confidence in forward planning and can result in patients who are medically optimised for discharge remaining in hospital beds longer than necessary.
We are working directly with a trust to address this problem by developing a model that predicts patient length of stay using admissions, patient, and treatment data from the CDM (Canonical Data Model) within the Federated Data Platform (FDP). A key challenge is the volume and diversity of information feeding into the EDD decision, which makes explainability essential for clinical and operational trust.
The model inference predictions will be able to be updated daily for a patient as new information becomes available. Crucially, the tool will highlight which changes in patient or pathway variables are driving changes in the predicted discharge window, allowing users to understand not just what has changed, but why.
Alongside model development, we have treated integration into user workflows as a first‑class requirement — ensuring outputs are actionable, interpretable, and aligned with how discharge planning decisions are made in practice and the tools they prefer to use. As the tool matures, we are exploring the incorporation of multi‑modal data to further allow the model to meet the users needs and improve predictive performance.
Events
Lots of exciting things coming up! See the full calendar here, and a small selection below.
London Data Week
4 July 2026 - 12 July 2026, Various Times, Various Locations
London Data Week (LDW) is a citywide, week-long public festival of data. Different organisations across London design and host public events over the week of the festival.
Take a look at the link for all the London Data Week events on this year!
Whose AI is it anyway? Data, sovereignty, and the geopolitics of intelligence
Wednesday 8 July 2026, 18:30pm - 20:30pm, Bush House, King’s College London, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG
In-person public event hosted by the Data Science Institute and King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence as part of London Data Week.
When Anthropic’s Fable 5 was ordered offline worldwide just three days after its release, it sharpened a question artificial intelligence increasingly raises: who’s in control?
Most governments talk about ‘sovereign’ AI and some are now building it, but what does it really mean for a country, an institution, or a citizen to have a say over those systems? What happens when that control slips?
Join the LSE Data Science Institute and King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence for a public panel bringing together leading voices to explore the technology, politics and security of AI and data sovereignty, and what’s at stake for the UK.
Followed by a drinks reception.
BriCS x Turing - Isambard-AI workshop (21st July 2026)
Tuesday 21 July 2026, 10:00 - 16:00, Enigma 2.0, The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2DB
The Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) and The Alan Turing Institute are running a joint 1-day introductory workshop on Isambard-AI.
The workshop is open to participants from UK research organisations (e.g. universities, NHS bodies, research institutes) and industry (UK registered business of any size with a Companies House registration number).
The workshop is free but you must register for a place. The workshop covers:
- Introduction to Isambard-AI
- Distributed PyTorch Training
- PyTorch Profiling
- Containers
See more future events on the calendar
Know of any events we should feature next month? Let us know by clicking the “Contribute” button, or here.
Check out our collection of training resources in the Resources Section! Can you spot something missing? Contact us!