phsopendata

phsopendata contains functions to interact with open data from the Scottish Health and Social Care Open Data platform via the CKAN API.

  • get_resource() extracts a single resource from an open dataset by resource id
  • get_latest_resource() extracts the most recent resource from applicable datasets, by dataset name
  • get_dataset() extracts multiple resources from an open dataset by dataset name
  • list_datasets() returns the names of all available datasets
  • list_resources() returns information on all resources within an open dataset by dataset name

phsopendata can be used on both Posit Workbench and desktop versions of RStudio.

Installation

You need to install phsopendata from GitHub, which requires a package like remotes or devtools.

Using remotes you run this to install the package:

remotes::install_github("Public-Health-Scotland/phsopendata",
  upgrade = "never"
)

Examples

Downloading a data table with get_resource()

To extract a specific resource, you will need its unique identifier - resource id. This can be found in the dataset metadata, the URL of a resource’s page on https://www.opendata.nhs.scot/, or extracted using list_resources().

library(phsopendata)

# define a resource ID
res_id <- "a794d603-95ab-4309-8c92-b48970478c14"

# download the data from the CKAN database
data <- get_resource(res_id = "a794d603-95ab-4309-8c92-b48970478c14")

Querying/filtering data with get_resource()

You can define a row limit with the rows argument to get the first N rows of a table.

# get first 100 rows
get_resource(
  res_id = "a794d603-95ab-4309-8c92-b48970478c14",
  rows = 100
)

You can use col_select and row_filters to query the data server-side (i.e., the data is filtered before it is downloaded to your machine).

# get first 100 rows
get_resource(
  res_id = "a794d603-95ab-4309-8c92-b48970478c14",
  col_select = c("GPPracticeName", "TelephoneNumber"),
  row_filters = list(
    HB = "S08000017",
    Dispensing = "Y"
  )
)

Downloading multiple tables with get_dataset()

To extract all resources from a dataset, you will need to use the dataset name. Note that this will differ from the dataset title that displays on the website. This can be found using list_datasets(), or taken from the dataset URL.

In this example, we are downloading GP Practice Population Demographics from: opendata.nhs.scot/dataset/gp-practice-populations, so the dataset name will be gp-practice-populations.

# if max_resources is not set, all resources will be returned by default.
# Here we pull 10 rows from the first 2 resources only
get_dataset("gp-practice-populations", max_resources = 2, rows = 10)

Contributing to phsopendata

At present, this package is maintained by Csilla Scharle.

If you have requests or suggestions for additional functionality, please contact the package maintainer and/or the PHS Open Data team.

If you would like to share examples of how you work with open data, you can also do so in the Open Data repository, where example scripts and resources are collated.