Consultant-led Referral to Treatment Waiting Times

Project Status: [In progress]

Project Description and data sources

This pipeline is being developed to automatically web-scrape the latest releases of NHS England's waiting times datasets and use the raw data to produce summary statistics which in the first instance mirror those produced in their monthly dashboards (see example for July 2020 here).

In addition, this data pipeline allows to produce descriptive statistics:

• At the provider or commissioning CCG level
• According to whether the provider is independent or not
• According to the commissioning CCG's level of deprivation based on the 2019 IMD (produced by MCHLG)
• According to the commissioning CCG's region (based on an ONS lookup)

How does it work?

• The code in '1a. Clean deprivation and regional lookup data.R' downloads and cleans the regional deprivation data as well as the geographical lookup tables, making these files fit for purpose.
• The code in '1b. Scrape links to RTT files and download and append and clean.R' web-scrapes the URLs of our required monthly datasets on waiting times from the NHS England website.

For example, for the month of April 2020, we download:

• 'RTT-APRIL-2020-full-extract': this file contains a row for each combination of provider (e.g. Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust), specialty (e.g. General Surgery) and pathway status (waiting to start, started admitted or started non-admitted). Each row summarises the distribution of waiting times for the relevant patients (e.g. how many patients are waiting between 0-1 weeks, 1-2 weeks, etc.).
• 'Apr20-newproviders', 'Apr20-providers-admitted', 'Apr20-providers-nonadmitted' : These three files allow us to identify, each month, which providers are flagged as independent (e.g. private clinics).

• The code in '2. Produce descriptive statistics.R' allows us to generate the following monthly descriptive statistics:

At the provider level:

• Total number of patients waiting to start by specialty
• Total number of patients started by specialty (split by admitted and non-admitted)
• The median number of weeks waited by patients, as well as the 95th and 92nd quantiles (these are national statistics)
• The percentage of patients below national waiting targets

At the comissioning CCG level:

• Same statistics as above, split by whether providers are independent or not
• Same statistics as above, split by IMD decile (10 levels) and quintile (5 levels)
• Same statistics as above, split by NHS England region

Requirements

These scripts were written in R version 4.0.2 and RStudio Version 1.1.383. The following R packages (available on CRAN) are needed:

• tidyverse
• [plyr]
• [readODS]
• [data.table]
• [rgdal]
• [readxl]
• [varhandle]
• [RSelenium]
• [seleniumPipes]
• [rvest]
• [downloader]
• [readr]

The list above is non exhaustive, but each of the individual .R codes in this repository indicates which packages are needed.

Authors

• Sebastien Peytrignet - Twitter - GitHub
• Jay Hughes - GitHub
• Karen Hodgson

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

NHS England and NHS Digital, who have provided the raw data and notes on methodology on their respective websites.