Upcoming Community Events

We hold regular events throughout the year. These range in their level of interactivity;

🧑‍🏫 Workshops and webinars

Please note:

  • Workshop attendance is restricted to UK employees of the NHS, public sector, civil service, voluntary sector, charities and academia, or who are retirees from any of these sectors. Please note you must sign up with a work email address to verify your credentials.
  • Webinars are free to all to attend, and recordings are stored on our YouTube Channel.

SEPTEMBER 2026

📆 10th UK Address Matcher: High performance free address matching software with Tom Hepworth:

Address matching is a common challenge when working with messy, inconsistent, or incomplete address data. In this webinar, we’ll introduce uk_address_matcher, an open-source Python package for matching UK addresses to canonical address datasets such as Ordnance Survey AddressBase or OS NGD. We’ll demonstrate how the package can be used to run fast, transparent, and reproducible address matching workflows, including how to interpret match scores and choose appropriate thresholds. The session will also introduce ukam_os_builder, a companion package that helps users quickly access and prepare Ordnance Survey data under PSGA licensing, making it easier to get started with high-quality reference data. The webinar will include practical examples and discussion of how these tools can support robust analytical pipelines.

Links:

uk_address_matcher ukam_os_builder

☕ Coffee and Coding 🍵

To register your interest in attending future Coffee & Coding session, please complete this short form.

Important

NB. Completing this form will allow you to be sent invitations to all future Coffee & Coding events (both the Wednesday and Thursday sessions).

📆 WEDNESDAYS Coffee and Coding:

  • Host: Simon Wellesley-Miller (NHSE)
  • 11:30 - 12:30 (GMT)

📆 THURSDAYS Coffee and Coding:

  • Host: Lucy Spencer (DHSC)
  • 10:30 - 11:30 (GMT)

What is 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 (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:

  • Recording: We record and publish our Coffee and Coding sessions. By joining the session, you consent to your voice, image and any questions you submit being recorded and subsequently published.

  • “Vegas rules”: If we decide not to record a session, “vegas rules” are applied 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.

Important

If you would like to request the removal of a recording, please contact the NHS Open Analytics Community mailbox.

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: See above links.

  • 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.

Previous recorded sessions (from before the merger with DHSC Coffee & Code) can be found here.

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