“How hard can it be?” That is my thought process when I come to approaching new challenges. If I’m able to see others excelling at one thing, I know that with enough time and practice I’ll be able to replicate what they can do. So, when I was asked to create a Power BI dashboard to enable ECC to share the residents’ survey data, “how hard can it be?”, came straight into my head.
Last month we were busy preparing some evidence for a leaders’ session on climate action in Essex. The Cabinet asked us to gather insight from data because climate is really important to Everyone’s Essex priorities and they want full picture …
Over the last year or so our team has carried out research around Covid-19, mental health, financial struggles, women’s safety and domestic abuse among other things. This has involved participants discussing past traumas and difficult periods they have experienced, which can leave us as researchers often dwelling on those conversations long after they have taken place...
So, first you’re probably thinking, what is Dineq? Well let’s deal with that first. Dineq is a package in R that enables you to run Gini functions. Gini coefficients are traditionally used to look at inequality across income in populations, …
Elizabeth Wiley shares her experience of participating in the Data Science Accelerator Programme
Through research with employees we found that there are many working parents within ECC who are feeling the pressures of juggling work and home life, and would benefit from some extra support. Our insights informed the development of a group coaching pilot. Evaluating well was key, and we were keen to learn as we go.
Our new demand and resource scenario planning tool is a similar idea to a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' for Adult Social Care!
We talk A LOT about the potential for data within our world, whether that’s with our data colleagues, across the services in our organisations, together with other public sector partners locally or nationally with our data peers. What we don’t …
In September 2020 we started on our journey to explore families' views of the current Short Breaks service. Our brief was to see how current services were meeting the needs of children with disabilities, and what services might look like in the future.
As it’s Mental Health Awareness Week this week, I wanted to write a blog to shine a light on some of the work we’ve been doing at the Essex Centre for Data Analytics and at Essex County Council. Mental health …
When I heard that the government had pulled the plug on unconscious bias training, I remember thinking that it felt like a backwards step. But a review found limited evidence that it creates behaviour change, and could even lead to "unintended negative consequences.” So, what was going on there that meant not only was it not very effective, but could actually be making things worse?