Project #129:
Curation of GP appointments data

We are interested in describing and measuring the effect of COVID disruption on GP appointments. We have access to a database of GP appointment data that contains appointment scheduling information for 40% of the population in England. Because we haven’t used this dataset before, we will first check that the data within it looks sensible; for example: is the date on which an appointment is booked always before the appointment date? Do we always know when an appointment is booked? If this information is missing, can we find any patterns of where it is missing (e.g., do some practices tend not to record it)? Does it look like some appointments are repeated in the dataset? These kinds of checks will help us decide whether any additional data cleaning steps need to be implemented before we carry out any our analyses.