NHS Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) Champion Squad

Our roving squad of RAP champions have helped a number of teams not only transform their pipelines, but also taught them how to train others and produced guidance which is used by many other organisations.

Figure 1: Multiple examples of how the team has marketed Reproducible Analytical Pipelines as a way of working. Click the image to visit our website.

Reproducible Analytical Pipelines (RAP) is a way of working promoted across the Civil Service, which promises faster, more efficient, more robust and transparent analysis and data pipelines.

Find out more about RAP on our guide See our helpful LinkedIn posts

Our Squad of RAP Champions has supported the rollout of RAP across the Analytics area within NHS England. We've approached through three main pillars of work:

• Making RAP guidance specific to our analysts needs: We took existing RAP guidance (such as the Government RAP strategy) and interpreted it in the local context of NHS England, making guidance specific to our systems and the problems faced by our analysts.
• Helping colleagues start their RAP journey: We put together a program for how to learn RAP, transform pipelines (through the "thin slice approach") and become a RAP champion yourself.
• Building a RAP community: RAP is about sharing and re-use, so we've been actively engaging with the NHS R and Python communities, AnalystX , the Govt Data Science community, and consolidating this learning in our own NHS RAP Community of Practice, and Health RAP Playbook (made with colleagues from other organisations in the industry).

We've also been active in promoting RAP up and down the business (as grassroots level, to managers and also to directors), and across the industry, making it something people want to be involved in, and ensuring they knew the value it offered.

Results

In the past two years we've:

• Massively raised the profile of RAP in the business - with benefits to colleagues learning and skills
• Helped start up two other squads of RAP champions within NHS England, who are now themselves going on to train more colleagues in RAP
• Greatly increased the number of publications with published code (it was zero, and now is everything here: NHSDigital/data-analytics-services#rap-publication-repositories).
• The teams who have implemented RAP have found their code is easier to understand, reuse, and often a lot faster, with one pipeline going from taking two analysts 2 weeks, to running in just 40 minutes.
• We also got through to the finals of HSJ Digital Awards - Replicating Digital Best Practice Award.

Our guidance is widely used by other organisations within the sector, and we've had great success rolling out RAP within NHS England.

Output	Link
NHS RAP Community of Practice Website	Website
NHS Digital Data Services - Analytics Service Repo	Github Repo
Health RAP playbook	Website