Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Health and Care Analytics The award recognises practitioners in applied health and care data analytics who have gone the extra mile in delivering innovative improvements for the health care system.

The Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Health and Care Analytics recognises practitioners in applied health and care data analytics who have gone the extra mile in delivering innovative improvements for the health and care system. 

The award from the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) and the Health Foundation was launched in 2020 to mark the bicentenary of Florence Nightingale’s birth. While known for her work as a nurse, Florence Nightingale was also a statistician, and was the first female fellow of the RSS in 1858. She revolutionised nursing through her investigative statistical work and her striking use of data visualisation.    

Award details  

The award, now in its fifth year, is aimed at UK practitioners whose work in health and care data analytics has led to significant improvements in patient care in a health and care system in the UK.  

The award recognises work carried out or started in the previous calendar year, either by teams or individuals. Applications from ongoing projects are also welcome. Entries need to demonstrate how the applied analysis has brought about positive change in the delivery or planning of care and substantial improvement in patient outcomes.   

Any health or care organisation that provides, commissions, supports or delivers health services free at the point of care in the UK, in primary, secondary or tertiary care, or across boundaries, is eligible to enter. Those working in health and care data analytics who work in conjunction with a health and care organisation free at the point of care are also eligible to enter.   

Entries can be submitted by teams or individuals themselves, or they can be nominated by others.  

Winners of the Florence Nightingale Award   

The 2023 award has been jointly awarded to two teams for their projects related to COVID-19. A team led by the University of Liverpool won for a project that involved setting up the world’s first city-wide, voluntary COVID-19 rapid antigen testing pilot in Liverpool. Data from the project informed UK and international pandemic policy. A collaboration between the universities of St Andrews, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Strathclyde also won for their project that analysed the care records of the entire adult population of Scotland in order to estimate the prevalence of long COVID. The results of the study have informed Public Health Scotland’s provision for long COVID patients. Find out more about these projects. 

The 2022 award has been given to the Visual Analytics Team at East London NHS Foundation Trust for their project to develop an improvement-focused quality management system using integrated apps. The team used data visualisation software to develop a series of apps to provide staff with easy access to clinical and non-clinical information that can help with decision making. Find out more about this project.  

In 2021 the award was given to the COVID-19 Population Risk Assessment team, for their predictive model, QCovid®. This model combines characteristics such as age, ethnicity, gender and deprivation from a number of national datasets to estimate an individual’s risk of catching and then being hospitalised or dying from COVID-19. Find out more about this project and those projects which were highly commended in 2021.  

There were joint winners of the inaugural award in 2020. A team of data analysts from NHS Blood and Transplant won for their algorithm to determine allocation of kidneys from deceased organ donors to patients on the UK kidney transplant waiting list. The other joint winner was a team from Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust and The Alan Turing Institute which developed a ‘guardian angel’ app to assist nurses when triaging patients in an emergency department. Find out more about these projects and those projects that were highly commended in 2020.  

How to apply  

Entries for the 2023 award are now open and the deadline for applications is midnight, Monday 29 April 2024.   

The full entry criteria, entry form and guidance document for applicants are available on the RSS website.   

The winner for 2024 will be announced and presented their award at a ceremony in London in July 2024. 

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