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 nearly 1,000 members from a wide range of organisations—primarily in the Midlands, but increasingly from across the UK. It 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 just 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: 26th June (11-12): Humans, AI and the Importance of Data Literacy

With Dan Isaac (Data Literacy & Training Lead, Exeter University) 

This Huddle promises to be hugely interesting to pretty much anyone - tell your friends!

Everyone is talking about AI, but people aren’t talking about the humans that use AI and the data that fuels it. In this talk, Dan aims to correct that by discussing:

The role of humans in evaluating AI

• Why AI tools and their human users should be evaluated as a singular system of distributed cognition
• The importance of prompt engineering
• Should we trust AI?

 AI’s data problem

• "Garbage In, Garbage Out": AI will provide poor outputs unless it is fed from good data.
• How can we define 'good' data?
• Understanding Availability Bias for humans and AI
• The data challenge faced by 'legacy' organisation
• The knowledge gap between AI/Data Professionals and Business Leaders

 Why humans need data literacy

• What is Data Literacy?
• Always asking "What does the data tell us?" when making a decision
• Data literacy is not intuitive and must be learned

Dan Isaac is the Data Literacy & Training Lead at the University of Exeter and a specialist in Data Visualisation, with a particular interest in the psychology behind effective data communication. Based at the University of Exeter, Dan has been delivering Data Visualisation training since 2013 and also teaching on the MSc Business Analytics programme at the University’s Business School.

This talk will be of interest to anyone!

Join me and Dan on Thursday 26th June at 11!

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

Click here to join the meeting Hop in at 11 am!