We've become the NHS R and Python Community
A new chapter
Hello NHS Python Community,
We’re officially joining forces with the NHS-R Community to become the NHS R and Python Community.
Since 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve championed open source in health and social care and empowered data scientists, engineers, health professionals, and students to build transparent, reproducible, and trustworthy tools that earn public confidence.
We’ve built NHS.pycom from the ground up, and without formal funding. As pressure on the NHS grows, our work becomes more important than ever—and so does our ability to sustain ourselves and the cause.
We’ve already been collaborating with NHS-R behind the scenes, delivering joint conferences like RPySOC and building open source packages. Now we’re making it official to unite our efforts and focus on what matters most: supporting you to learn, develop, and share open source.
What We’ve Built Together
We know shifting the NHS toward open source isn’t just about the tools we use, it’s about shifting the mindset within our organisations to recognise the long-term value and power of open source - both behind the scenes and publicly.
In service of this culture shift we have built:
Impactful free and open source community projects like our NHS Geospatial Route Optimiser - a grassroots project that secured 2nd place in the Civil Service Government Challenge, beating out multiple government-funded, closed-source projects.
Yearly open source conferences (p.s. submit your abstracts for RPySOC by 5/09/2025), and championed wider innovation through show-and-tells and YouTube
A first-of-its-kind hackathon event bringing together hundreds of NHS staff to work with each other and industry to create meaningful AI solutions in healthcare with open data
Packages like nhspy-plotthedots, open code leaderboards, tutorials on everything from Python basics to machine learning, and NHS-themed open-source templates
We have also advocated for our community to senior leaders in the NHS and externally to industry, academia, and the wider ecosystem.
What This Means for You
You’ll join a larger, more vibrant community with expanded support and better access to peers who can help you thrive (including coffee and coding sessions and drop-ins). While we figure out the details in the background, please join the NHS R Slack which will be our new home.
Thank You
We want to sincerely thank everyone who’s joined this community as a member, board member, volunteer, advocate, teacher, builder, collaborator and those always posting and answering questions in Slack. We always notice your contributions and want to keep this momentum going.
We’re looking forward to building the future of open source in healthcare with you.
Mary Amanuel (@maryamanuel1) and Sam Hollings (@samhollings)
On behalf of the NHS Python Community Board (NHS-pyboard).