We are pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Health and Care Analytics. Named in honour of Florence Nightingale, the Society’s first female fellow and a pioneer of data visualisation, this award celebrates data analysts in the health and care sector whose work has led to better health outcomes across the UK.
Dr Sarah Cumbers, chief executive of the Royal Statistical Society, said: ‘I’m pleased to see yet again that there are so many exceptional teams working to improve healthcare through the power of statistics. For the award’s seventh year, the winning and highly commended entries serve as excellent examples of what good statistical practice looks like in a setting of truly vital importance. They have also gone above and beyond in their involvement of the central stakeholders in the healthcare system. Congratulations to the teams for their well-deserved recognition.’
The following teams received their awards during a ceremony held in London.
Winner: The Networked Data Lab for ‘Understanding health and equity during waits for NHS care: insights from across the UK using novel data linkages’.
In 2025, the Networked Data Lab (NDL) brought together analytical teams across four UK regions (West Yorkshire, Cheshire and Merseyside, Northwest London, and Grampian, Scotland) to address critical evidence needed to effectively manage NHS elective care waits.
These NDL teams accessed and linked a wide range of datasets spanning waiting lists, primary care, and hospital activity to identify the most important points for intervention, support, and service improvement.
The work uncovered marked inequalities: patients from deprived communities and ethnic minority groups experienced longer waits and used more emergency care while waiting. We also showed that waiting is not a passive period. Patients had frequent contact with primary care—often 9–14 GP appointments per year—with significant associated costs for the healthcare system.
By combining local data expertise to create novel data linkage with a consistent analytical approach at sites across the UK, the NDL went beyond the limits of national datasets and routine local reporting. It enabled teams to answer strategic, system-level questions grounded in frontline need, thereby generating actionable insights to target interventions, reduce inequalities, and support more effective elective care recovery.
The award judges praised the work for its depth and strong collaborative approach, with analytical outputs that have had a direct impact on care provision.
Highly commended: The RTT Planner Project Team of the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board for ‘Facilitating improved management of hospital waiting lists: RTT Planner tool’.
The RTT Planner has sought to produce an open-source, publicly available and user-friendly tool for modelling the interactions between waiting list demand, capacity and performance, subject to ‘do nothing’ and ‘what if’ scenario assumptions, and for any specialty at Trust, ICB, regional or national level.
It is the culmination of many years of developmental work, shaped through practical engagement with a multitude of clinical, operational and strategic decision-makers.
Development of the Planner enabled numerous Trusts and ICBs to produce better forward planning, and has also helped NHS England to validate submitted plans. Additionally, key insights derived from the tool have been discussed with senior advisors to the government and have received national press coverage.
The judges praised the work for going above and beyond in consulting relevant teams to ensure the tool’s usefulness, as well as the submission’s evident focus on promoting diversity, transparency, and openness.