fingertipsR: an R package for accessing population health information in England

Abstract

Fingertips is a major public repository of population and public health indicators for England, built and maintained by Public Health England (PHE). The indicators are arranged in thematic or topical profiles covering a wide range of health issues including: broad Health Profiles; specific topics such as liver disease and end of life; risk factors including alcohol, smoking, physical activity; population healthcare health services data for general practices, cancer, mental health; health protection data on general health protection, TB, antimicrobial resistance; lifecourse profiles for younger and older people; mortality and morbidity. Fingertips makes data available for more than 1,500 indicators spread across more than 70 profiles. The data can be accessed from https://fingertips.phe.org.uk where the data are visualised in variety of ways including heatmaps, choropleth maps, line charts for trends, "spine" charts (graphs which compare multiple indicators for a single geographic area), scatter plots and so on. Data can be obtained as downloads or figures which can be exported or cut and paste into reports and slides. A recent addition to the Fingertips platform was an Automated Programming Interface (API) to enable developers to re-use the data. To facilitate access to Fingertips data we have designed an R package - fingertipsR - enabling rapid and easy access to the data by analysts and data scientists. The package is available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). This paper describes the fingertipsR package which provides tools accessing a wide range of public health data for England from the Fingertips website using its API.