fingertipsR: an R package for accessing population health information in England

Abstract

AbstractFingertips is a major public repository of population and public health indicators for England, built and maintained by Public Health England (PHE). The indicators are arranged in thematic or topical profiles covering a wide range of health issues including:broad Health Profilesspecific topics such as liver disease and end of liferisk factors including alcohol, smoking, physical activitypopulation healthcare health services data for general practices, cancer, mental healthhealth protection data on general health protection, TB, antimicrobial resistancelifecourse profiles for younger and older peoplemortality and morbidity.Fingertips makes data available for more than 1,500 indicators spread across more than 70 profiles. The data can be accessed from https://fingertips.phe.org.uk where the data are visualised in variety of ways including heatmaps, choropleth maps, line charts for trends, “spine” charts (graphs which compare multiple indicators for a single geographic area), scatter plots and so on. Data can be obtained as downloads or figures which can be exported or cut and paste into reports and slides.A recent addition to the Fingertips platform was an Automated Programming Interface (API) to enable developers to re-use the data. To facilitate access to Fingertips data we have designed an R package - fingertipsR - enabling rapid and easy access to the data by analysts and data scientists. The package is available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).This paper describes the fingertipsR package which provides tools accessing a wide range of public health data for England from the Fingertips website using its API.