readnhs aims to facilitate webscraping of datasets from the National Health Service Digital website. It’s goal is to remove the manual steps involved (and time taken) in navigating to an NHS-D webpage, searching for the dataset of interest and downloading a local copy. It will be particularly useful for incorporating into routine analysis that needs to be regularly updated based on the latest NHS data.
You can install the readnhs package as follows:
if (!requireNamespace("librarian")) install.packages("librarian")
librarian::shelf(DataS-DHSC/readnhs)To use this package you will need the URL for the NHS webpage that contains the embedded data you are trying to download and will need to specify an end destination for where you would like to save the downloaded data.
# Assign the URL of the NHS webpage that contains required data to nhs_url
nhs_url <- "https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/appointments-in-general-practice/june-2023"
# Assign the destination you would like to save the downloaded data into as destfilepath. Note that the file format must match the format of the file you are downloading and any new folder directories will be created if they do not already exist.
destfilepath <- "data.csv"
# Check order position of dataset of interest within the list of datasets available
get_all_nhs_data_urls(nhs_url)
# Assign the order position to item_number
item_number <- 4
# Download specified data to user specified destination
download_nhs_data(nhs_url, item_number, destfilepath)
# Retrieve relevant metadata (publication title, publication date, geographic coverage and granularity and date range)
get_metadata(nhs_url)