About

The Data Science team at the Strategy Unit comprises the following team members:

• Chris Beeley
• Claire Welsh
• Francis Barton
• Matt Dray
• Ozayr Mohammed
• Rhian Davies
• Tom Jemmett
• YiWen Hon
• Eirini Komninou

The team has a wealth of experience in deploying models and other products to the cloud for use by a wide range of users across health and care. This is particularly demonstrated in our work with the New Hospital Programme, where we built and deployed a sophisticated probabilistic demand and capacity model and supported the use of its outputs across the decision-making stages that lead to the construction of a new hospital. The data science team possesses expertise across the breadth of data science activity — for example, statistics, machine learning, natural language processing, and real-time evidence mapping. We also have significant experience in sharing our methods and code as open-source, as well as in training others to use these tools and understand foundational data science concepts and practices. Our experience in developing scalable data science solutions, and open-sourcing them for the benefit of users across health and care, enables us to contribute meaningfully at every stage of a project’s life cycle — from design through to deployment and adoption.

Current and previous projects of note include:

• Work supporting the New Hospitals Programme, including building a model for predicting the demand and capacity requirements of hospitals in the future, and a tool for mapping the evidence on this topic.
• The Patient Experience Qualitative Data Categorisation project
• Work supporting the wider analytical community, through events/communities such as NHS-R and HACA.