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 1,300 members from a wide range of organisations - mainly in the Midlands, but increasingly from across the UK. 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 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: 19th March (11-12): Discharged without a diagnosis: what does it mean for patients, providers and improvement?

This session explores a large but often overlooked group of emergency inpatients: those who leave hospital without a specific diagnosis. Drawing on national hospital data, Andrew Jones, Senior Healthcare Analyst and Steven Wyatt, Head of Research and Policy (Strategy Unit) will share what they found about the scale of this phenomenon, who is most affected, and what it might mean for patient care, hospital efficiency and service improvement. The session will also introduce an emerging typology of four distinct patient classes and discuss how analysis like this can support better decision-making.

What you will learn:

• how common discharge without a diagnosis is in emergency inpatient care
• what the analysis suggests about who is most affected and how patterns vary across groups
• why this cohort should not be treated as one single category
• what the findings might mean for care quality, patient experience, diagnostic pathways and hospital pressure
• how national administrative data can be used to shed light on a clinically and operationally important issue

Analysts interested in using routine data to explore overlooked questions in urgent and emergency care, clinicians and service leads interested in diagnostic uncertainty, inpatient flow and patient experience, operational managers and improvement leads thinking about avoidable pressure, escalation and pathways and decision-makers and policy audiences interested in the intersection of equity, efficiency and quality in hospital care

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!