Our Health Service Modelling Associates (HSMA) programme delivers two important outcomes: first, directly supporting the implementation of new ways of working that deliver better outcomes for patients and services; second, developing, in NHS and other partner organisations, capacity and skills in AI and digital technologies central to NHS policy and innovation.
Participating staff first learn skills in data science and operational research and then learn how to apply them to real-world problems facing their organisations. On completing the 15-month programme, they take what they have learned back to their organisations. Alumni remain part of HSMA, contributing to active online discussions, sharing tools and approaches and mentoring newer participants.
HSMA started in 2016 as a small local programme with 6 participants but is now open to participants nationally. The 2024/25 course includes 180 people. This graph shows the rapid growth in participants – the bars show the numbers by cohort and the orange line the running total including almost 500 people from over 100 organisations.
The training, accredited by the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts, is delivered virtually, using all open-source software, and is free to participants through funding from NHS England Digital.
Examples of participants’ work include:
- Transforming performance with significantly reduced waiting times at minimal cost by improving flow through the Urgent Treatment Centre at UCL Hospitals
- Identifying a simple approach to overcome bottlenecks in neuro-developmental assessments in Oxford Health NHSFT
- Providing evidence from geographic modelling to underpin service redesign by the South East Cardiac Network to reduce cardiac patients’ travel times
- Enabling public health and police analysts to map violence involving firearms, with results now used in national intelligence reports
- Creating a tool to generate health equity assessment reports for Trusts, 80 times as fast as the current manual approach.
Learn more about our Health Services Modelling Associates (HSMA) Programme.
Updated Feb 2025.