Welcome to the home of the Health Service Modelling Associates (HSMA) programme on GitHub!

Our GitHub is where you can find all of our slides, code examples, and coding exercises. There are also standalone teaching resources like our Discrete Event Simulation Playground.

HSMA is a 15-month programme of training and mentoring for people working in health, social care and policing in England, covering a range of data science and operational research techniques. We take participants all the way from the basics up to Python through to using discrete event simulation, geographic optimization, machine learning, agent-based simulation, and much more. You can find out more about the programme on our website.

But don't fret if you're not able to apply formally to the course - you can follow along with everything here, and our Youtube Channel houses the the lectures that go with each of these repositories.

All of our training materials are made available Free and Open Source, with most of the content provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International [cc-by-nc-sa] License, meaning you are welcome to copy, share and adapt most of our materials - though it's worth checking the individual licence on the repositories.

HSMA has now run for several rounds - archived repositories relate to an earlier run of the programme, but are perfectly fine to refer to if there isn't an active repository covering the same topic!

We are also producing ebooks of some of our course content.

Check out our Python book, which is designed for absolute beginners to programming in the Python programming language. It will take you from your first code, through data structures, conditional logic, loops, tabular data manipulation and making graphs. It can also be a useful resource for intermediate programmers who haven't previously done object-oriented programming - making it a good primer before going onto our DES book, where we will be writing object-oriented code.

You can check out the Discrete event simulation book to find out all about what discrete event simulation is and how to use the simpy package to create your first simulation model in Python. The book then covers a range of advanced concepts that you may need for real-world models.

Our geographic visualisation and optimization book is in its early stages of development as well - it covers plotting in QGIS and Python, as well as facility location problems, but check back in late 2024 for chapters on multiobjective optimization algorithms and geospatial statistics and outlier detection.

You can also check out our collection of example notebooks on the topic of machine learning.

Finally, our Streamlit Book introduces you to writing and deploying web apps using the beginner-friendly but powerful Streamlit framework - you'll have an interactive and professional-looking web app up in no time!

HSMA is all about upskilling people to be able to undertake their own applied data science and operational modelling projects - below are just a handful of the projects our fabulous HSMAs have produced over the years!

You can find out more about our projects on Youtube for HSMA 3, HSMA 4 or HSMA 5, or read about them on our projects page.

HSMA is a programme that is conceived, developed, and is supported by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC) and supported by funding from the NHS Digital Academy.