NHS Step Up Career Challenge

End-to-end analysis of antidepressant prescribing in England across all three pathways of the NHS DigData Step Up Career Challenge (Excel, R, Python), plus an interactive web dashboard combining cross-sectional and longitudinal views.

Live demo: https://mulualem03.github.io/nhs-step-up-challenge/PrescribeIQ_app.html

Headline findings

• Volume up 19% over four years (Jan 2021 to Oct 2024) but NHS cost fell 37% (the generic-drug effect).
• Sertraline dominates volume (27% of all items in Dec 2024) but Venlafaxine dominates cost (23% of spend).
• North East & Yorkshire growing 3x faster than the South West (+29% vs +9%).
• Forecast model achieves R squared of 0.82 and predicted Dec 2024 within 1.3% of actual.

Deliverables

• Challenge_A_Antidepressant_Analysis.xlsx: Excel workbook for Challenge A with 130 live formulas, four sheets, and embedded charts.
• Challenge_A_Dec2024_Snapshot.pptx: 10-slide stakeholder presentation for the Excel snapshot analysis.
• Challenge_B_R_Analysis.R: R script (dplyr, ggplot2) for the longitudinal analysis.
• Challenge_C_Python_Analysis.py: Python script (pandas, scikit-learn) for the longitudinal analysis with forecasting.
• Challenge_BC_FourYearTrends.pptx: 9-slide presentation summarising the four-year trend findings.
• PrescribeIQ_app.html: Five-tab interactive web dashboard (HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Chart.js inlined). Open in any browser.
• Project_Retrospective_NHS.md: Reflective retrospective using Gibbs' cycle.

Tech

Python (pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib), R (dplyr, ggplot2, lubridate), HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Chart.js, Excel, PowerPoint.

Note on data

All data is from the NHSBSA Open Data Portal (https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/), an official NHS open data source. The longitudinal dataset is fetched directly from the NHS England DigData GitHub repository at runtime.