Data Viz: Crisis in A&E?
So did you see this amazing Viz by Kelly Martin? http://vizcandy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-nuclear-energy-option.html. Just take a look, talk about inspirational…
…well so I was inspired, I haven’t done a public Viz in a while and so I set off to look for something that grabbed my attention data-wise, I turned to the news (always a good place to get good ideas for data visualisations). The NHS was high on the agenda on the news items and what’s more the admissions data for A&E is open source so I went to grab the data from here. If you look you’ll see .xls and .csv files and neither are in what I’d call a user friendly format. There are some issues and I list them below as these serve as guidance to all data providers:
1. The data was split over many weeks, each week was a separate file
2. The data files themselves had several rows of data at the top detailing the date of the data, etc, and so it wasn’t possible to simply concatenate and import them into Tableau.
This is where, for me, Alteryx provides a unique solution. Not only could I write a workflow to parse each HTML page and download the xls files, I could then write a second workflow to strip the unnecessary content, and record the date from the header as a column then merge all the data and export it to Tableau (pivoting it too to give a long, tall format in case I needed it).
I’ll detail the exact steps in Alteryx in a later blog, but for now here’s the Viz Kelly inspired, I’m not sure it even comes close to her design, but I’ve done my best. Click on the image below to view the Viz in full.
