Early career

Yet another good reason to maintain a calendar table.

My preferred alternative for creating a bed census from inpatient episodes.

Use a calendar table!

Producing a listing of activity sounds simple. But the way you format the listing makes the difference between a happy customer and an unhappy one.

Searching for episodes coded with a particular diagnosis or procedure code is a bread-and-butter task for NHS information analysts.

A pattern for creating sustainable routine reports in Excel.

Like most people, I’m quick to turn to Google when I need to know something, and Google searches for SQL-related questions throw up plenty of results from sites like StackOverflow. However, many companies produce database software, and many of these products are queried using a language called “SQL”. But it turns out that each product has its own dialect. Keywords that work in one product may not work in another - and so the answer you find may not work in your database.