Coffee & Coding

Coffee and Coding is a core initiative of the NHS-OA Community, designed to provide an informal, supportive space for NHS, DHSC and the wider health and social care sector to share knowledge about Open Source open-source analytics (mainly R & Python).

It’s essentially a “community of practice” where the focus is on learning from peers rather than formal classroom instruction.

What Happens in a Session?

The sessions typically last an hour and are held virtually (usually via MS Teams). While they are organic and informal, they generally follow a loose structure:

  • Show and Tell: One or more members demonstrate a piece of code they’ve written, a new package they’ve discovered, or a dashboard they’ve built.
  • Library/Tip of the Week: A quick highlight of a useful tool or shortcut that makes analytical life easier.
  • Code Surgery: A space for members to bring “code dilemmas.” You can share your screen and get live help from the community on a specific bug, logic problem or just general advice.
  • General Discussion: Open floor for networking and discussing broader topics like RAP (Reproducible Analytical Pipelines), visualisation techniques, data science etc.

Key Rules and Ethos

The community operates on a few specific principles to keep the environment safe and productive:

  • “Vegas Rules”: While training demos are often recorded, the general discussions and Q&A are typically not recorded (or the recording is stopped) to ensure people feel comfortable asking “simple” questions or admitting they are stuck. (Vegas Rules – what happens in Vegas – stays in Vegas)
  • No Patient Data: This is strictly enforced. Code is shared using “dummy” or synthetic data; real patient data is never shown.
  • Inclusivity: It is aimed at all skill levels. A typical session is roughly 40% beginners, 45% intermediate, and 15% advanced users.
  • First Rule of C&C: “Tell everyone about Coffee and Code”—the goal is to grow the open-source movement within the healthcare sector.

How to Join

  • Frequency: Sessions usually happen every weeks, rotating between different days (Wednesdays & Thursdays) to ensure people with different shift patterns or part-time schedules can attend.
  • Booking: You don’t usually need to “book” a ticket in the traditional sense, but you can sign up via the NHS-OA Community Page to get the MS Teams calendar invite and the .ics file.
  • Slack: Much of the follow-up and resource sharing happens on the NHS-OA Community Slack channel, which is a great place to stay connected between sessions. Why go?

If you are an analyst in the NHS, it’s one of the best ways to break out of your silo. You’ll find that someone else has almost always faced the same problem you’re currently struggling with, and they’ve likely already written a script to solve it. Its always great to see what other people are up to and be inspired and share ideas, you just don’t know what you don’t know – this is a safe space to find out. We want to share the cool stuff we are doing and help the community to thrive to support patient care.

Dates of upcoming sessions

To see the dates of upcoming Coffe & Code sessions and to sign up to attend please see the events page.

Back to top