Public health statistical tools

This page provides details of tools which can be used for the calculation of many of the statistics described in this guide.

It also provides links to tools which interact with data in OHID’s Fingertips platform. Fingertips is a major public repository of population and public health indicators for England. The site presents the information in many ways to improve accessibility for a wide range of audiences ranging from public health professionals and researchers to the general public. The information presented is a mixture of data available from other public sources, and those that are available through user access agreements with other organisations.

The R and Python tools are currently being maintained by OHID.

The Excel tools were produced by predecessor organisations and are no longer being maintained. They remain available here as potentially useful resources for calculating key statistics outside R or Python.


R

PHEindicatormethods

The PHEindicatormethods R package has various functions based on the statistical methods used for OHID indicators which analysts can use to calculate:

  • proportions

  • rates

  • standardised rates

  • means

  • life expectancy

  • slope index of inequality

  • confidence intervals for these statistics

  • assignment of data to quantiles

PHEindicatormethods can be installed from CRAN or from the PHEindicatormethods GitHub page.

fingertipsR

The fingertipsR package allows users to download data behind the Fingertips platform Fingertips.

fingertipsR can be installed from rOpenSc or from the fingertipsR GitHub page.

Python

PHStatsMethods

The PHStatsMethods package is the Python equivalent of PHEindicatormethods R package.

PHStatsMethods can be installed from PyPI using pip, or from the PHStatsMethods GitHub page.

fingertips_py

The fingertips_py package is the Python equivalent of the fingertipsR R package.

The fingertips_py documentation provides detailed instructions about how to use the package. It can be installed using pip, following instructions on the fingertips_py GitHub page.

Excel

The following excel tools were produced by predecessor organisations to calculate public health statistics:


Page last updated: August 2024