Welcome to the Midlands Analyst Network

Thank you for being part of our growing community! If you are an analyst who works in health & care or the wider public sector, then join the Midlands Analyst Network!

Launched in April 2020, this thriving community now connects almost 1,500 members from a wide range of organisations from the Midlands and beyond. The Network provides a supportive space for analysts to share ideas, resources, and good practice, as well as to seek advice, spark debate, and develop skills together.

I love how the huddles have grown into a space beyond simply sharing ideas and work, to a regular opportunity for analysts to come together as a community. They frequently lead to insightful and previously unconsidered questions and debates and also serve as a fantastic welcoming opportunity for those dipping their toes into the world of analytics and improved decision making. Andi Orlowski, Director of the Health Economics Unit

Meet your Network lead: Rachel Caswell

Rachel is a Senior Healthcare Analyst at the Strategy Unit and the Lead for Training & Development. She's passionate about developing the Network and supporting analysts across the system to connect, learn, and lead through collaboration.

Fortnightly Huddles

At the heart of the Network are our fortnightly online Huddles, hosted on MS Teams (see link below). The Huddles cover a large range of topics and you are very welcome to join one at any time – for quick access to a Huddle, just follow the link below.  You don’t have to be a member of the Midlands Analyst Network to come to a Huddle but if you’d like to be kept up to date with all future Huddles and training opportunities then contact Rachel (rachel.caswell@nhs.net) and we’ll take it from there.

We try to keep them as informal but as informative as possible and welcome contributions from Network members as well from academia, subject specialists, national and occasionally international presenters.

If you have any queries about the Huddles, how to access them, if you want to find out what’s gone before, or you want to present then please contact Rachel.

Next Huddle: 20 August (11-12): Hospital Admission Thresholds, the Left Shift, and Why Admission Avoidance Schemes May Not Reduce Bed Occupancy

Could successful admission avoidance simply lower the threshold for who gets admitted? Join us to explore what the data tells us.

Most patients who are admitted to hospital in an emergency will have first passed through an Emergency Department (ED). For every patient in the ED, a clinician must decide whether admission is necessary. Clinical need should dominate that decision - but there's good evidence that factors such as a patient's social circumstances, a clinician's risk tolerance, and the availability of inpatient beds all play a part.

Combine these individual decisions across a department, or across the country, and you get an effective threshold for admission: in general, how ill do ED patients need to be before they're admitted?

This threshold has implications for the left shift. If out-of-hospital services succeed in freeing up hospital capacity, and capacity influences admission decisions, then thresholds could quietly fall - and the beds freed by left-shift initiatives could be filled by patients who would not otherwise have been admitted. Gains in capacity would be neutralised, more or less invisibly.

In this Huddle, Rachel Caswell will be joined by Andrew Jones and Steven Wyatt (Strategy Unit) will examine the idea of an admission threshold. They will explain how it might be estimated from routine data, and cover what "casemix-adjusted odds of admission" means. They will then look at whether the admission threshold been changing nationally, and if it’s possible to monitor near-live thresholds for 170-plus Type 1 EDs.

What will you learn?

What 'case-mix adjusted odds of admission' is

How to estimate admission thresholds from routine data and how to monitor them

Who is the session for?

This session will be relevant to analysts, urgent and emergency care leads, and anyone with a stake in left-shift initiatives.

Same Teams link as usual and if you don't have this - it's here!

Click here to join the meeting Join us 11 am!

Up and coming Huddles

• 03/09/26: Launch of the National Analyst Network
• 17/09/26: Midlands Prevention Toolkit, with Su Xavier and Olivia Conroy
• 26/11/26: Exploring workforce opportunities for analysts with Neil Morgan and Jon Adamson, MLCSU