Monday 19 October 2015

Hourly ebb and flow of cases in England's hospital emergency departments

Introduction

This is a report on NHS Emergency Department attendances.
The question is this: How does the hourly attendance figures vary by hour and day of week?

Data sources

The health and Social care Information centre publishes lots of data in various formats. Data on ED attendance by hour and day of week (aggregate for all hospitals with an A&E Unit in England) for the years 2011-12 and 2012-13 were downloaded from the HSCIC website.

The weekly pattern

Using R’s base plotting 2011-12 data

Using GGplot2 with faceting

Conclusion

There is a clear ebb and flow pattern in the hourly number of cases that are seen in Accident and Emergency Departments in England. regardless of week day or weekend the peak hourly attendance occurs at around 10 or 11 am, with the trough in the early hours of the morning between 4 and 6 am.
Whether or not this fluctuating pattern is justified by clinical need is another question.

Thursday 15 October 2015

Indian Rupee / Chinese Yuan - the long view

INR/CNY currency movements - The long view

15 Oct 2015

Introduction

There’s always been interest in how the world’s 2 largest emerging economies - India and China - are faring, both in absolute terms and relative to each other. One simple measure is exhange rate movements.

Detail

The Bank of England publishes daily spot prices of all the world’s currencies against each of the 3 major reserve currencies, the US Dollar, Sterling and the Euro.
R provides the means to download these data directly from the Bank’s website and process them further. This report is produced in RMarkdown with R code using the packages ‘GGplot2’ and ‘gridExtra’
It extracts daily spot prices of the Indian Rupee and the Chinese RMB against Sterling and the US Dollar from 1st Jan 2006 to the latest date and presents the data as 4 time series plots.

Summary

On 14 Oct 2015 the Indian Rupee traded at 64.87 to the US dollar, and 100.14 to the GB Pound
On 14 Oct 2015 the Chinese Yuan traded at 6.35 to the US dollar, and 9.8 to the GB Pound.

The chart