Speaker: Cathy Hopkinson, Senior Statistician, NHS Blood and Transplant
Date: Tuesday 1 April 2025, 1.30PM (held online)
In April 2025, the Medical Section of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) organised an online event to discuss best practice when planning and creating visualisations to communicate health care findings. Cathy, a Senior Statistician for NHS Blood and Transplant, drew from her many years of experience working as a medical statistician in ocular donation and transplantation. Cathy began the event by reflecting on the scientific questions and purpose that motivate visualisations: what information do we wish to convey? What data relationships are the most important ones in our problem? What is the most effective way of communicating these? Cathy discussed the different features of the data that can be captured by adopting one or another visualisation strategy. For instance, is communicating flow, magnitude or change over time the most important aspect of the problem? If interested in showing changes in flows from one condition to at least one other, and in communicating the ultimate outcome of a process, then a Sankey diagram could be a good option. Cathy went through colour schemes, annotation of graphs, and introduced the audience to a (partially) freely available visualisation software called Flourish – although many other alternative visualisation tools exist.
Cathy worked through illustrative examples and engaged the audience to discuss best approaches in specific examples. The event was very well registered (over 200 registrations) and attended on the day (over 150 attendees).
The event concluded with an open discussion and Q&As. The feedback received from the attendees was very positive and Cathy delivered a very engaging and interesting session!
Report written by Elisa Allen on behalf of the RSS Medical Section