In 2015, I found myself running a Hackspace in Leigh, Lancashire - a place where we had coders, makers and other creatives brought together in a shared workshop premises. We had been running a Code Club for children for some time and we were invited to participate in the Young Rewired State Festival Of Code. This event was a week-long hackathon, during which teams of under-18s spend 5 days ‘hacking’ on a project at their home base - in our case, Leigh Hackspace - and then they would travel to the ICC in Birmingham for the YRS final.
Some of our team members had previously participated in YRS, for others like myself it was the first one. The aim of YRS is to build something that improves society, solves a community’s problem, or otherwise demonstrates some kind of wider civic benefit.
We were lucky enough to be able to form two small teams, one of ‘YRS-ers’ around 11-14 and another team of 16-18 year-olds. The older group made the fundamental mistake of asking me for a project idea and I suggested that they could try to build an API to calculate child health centiles, simply because I’d been playing around with this problem over preceding months and had a good understanding of the maths behind the API, so would be able to guide them.
They worked hard on that project for the five days at Leigh Hackspace and even added a ‘stretch goal’ - to include obesity prevalence data (from the National Child Measurement Project), which although a readily available dataset, is accessed only as a vast and incomprehensible Excel spreadsheet from the ONS website, meaning that for most clinicians’ use-case (“what’s the prevalence of obesity in the area that my patient lives?”) it is effectively useless. So we decided to make a simple lookup so that you could enter the patient’s postcode and get the obesity prevalence data for that postcode.
We took all this great work to the YRS finals in Birmingham in July 2015. The first day is very much social and finishing off the coding work. The team confidently got through the heats and into the finals, which were held on Sunday. Their final presentation was impressively professional and well delivered. They came away with a very honourable third place, and some great experience and memories.
The Leigh Hackspace YRS Senior team presenting their Clinical Calculator API in the YRS 2015 finals
Ellen
I want to take a moment here to remember Ellen Higginbottom, one of the YRS team members, who was killed in Wigan the following year. She was a witty, intelligent and driven young woman and it is a tragedy we never got to see what she would have been capable of achieving. Ellen Higginbottom's Memorial Garden
The team were also successful in winning the NHS England Obesity Data Prize, which was an impressive second feat, and gained them a fairly appreciable prize fund.
For the next few years, I didn’t really think about Growth Charts or Centile values all that much, but the YRS work and the preceding work I’d done in open source was up on GitHub, and this is presumably how the RCPCH found me in 2020 when they asked if I would help them build Digital Growth Charts - this time ‘for real’ - as an official project of the RCPCH and to become a national digital project which would have to integrate with the Electronic Health Record software in use across the NHS.
I’m writing this as I return home from the RCPCH Annual Conference 2024 at which we’ve been showcasing the RCPCH Digital Growth Charts, and launching the RCPCH Incubator which has really stemmed directly from the development of the Growth Charts. Just under nine years ago I was at the ICC with ‘Clinical Calculator API’ for YRS, and now I’m actually doing the real thing at national scale. I wanted to write a bit of a post about it just to thank all the people who were involved, all the way from YRS in 2015, the preceding work I did at NHS Hack Days, and the RCPCH Incubator team.
YRS Team
16-18s
Jack Wilsdon
Niam Patel
Ellen Higginbottom
11-14s
Kit Balmer
Leigh Hackspace team
Repositories
PyCentile - one of the original implementations I had done before YRS GitHub - bawmedical/PyCentile: Python Implementation of logic for producing Centile values from CDC or UK90 LMS tables
The Centile App - a very early mixed repo of JS and Python Centile calculation work GitHub - bawmedical/the_centile_app: statistical engine for calculating paediatric growth centiles
Links
NHS England » Obesity data challenge calls innovators to bid for new £30k prize
NHS England » Obesity data challenge innovators claim £30k prize