Data Scientist

Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) is the biggest employer in Nottingham with over 19,000 staff

Main area Data Science and Data Analysis Grade Band 7 Contract Permanent Hours

• Full time
• Flexible working
• Home or remote working

37.5 hours per week (Hybrid working: 2 hospital sites + working from home) Job ref 164-7110693

Site Queen's Medical Centre Town Nottingham Salary £46,148 - £52,809 per annum Salary period Yearly Closing 09/05/2025 23:59 Interview date 09/05/2025

Job overview

We sit in the centre of one of the largest data-rich acute hospitals in England, and we need your help to uncover and tell the stories hidden in our data!

We need you to:

Get close to, and stay close to the clinicians who are seeing patients, and the managers who are helping make improvements in our hospitals.

Help us plan, prioritise, forecast, and simulate our way to better outcomes and experiences for patients.

Identify and diagnose problems, decide how your data skills can be best applied, and then show us what your techniques can do.

Actively help steer our improvement using the insight that you build from working in detail with our data.

Help us share more of our code in public (we work mainly in R and python).

NUH is a large acute trust (you can see our ED at work in recent series of "24 Hours in A&E"), and we are a data team well-connected to our senior decision-makers. There will never be less data available than there is today, and the rate that large hospitals generate data points is increasing. Our team is busy finding ways to uncover signal in the noise AND make it directly operationally useful to the people who can make and change decisions.

We're a small and friendly team, and we're working on interesting and impactful work. Can you help us?

This is a permanent hybrid role, split between days at home and days in the office in Nottingham.

Main duties of the job

Our work covers a wide range of subjects, including inpatients, outpatients, theatres, diagnostics, elective work, emergency work, paediatrics, planning, and support for capital projects.

You will be working alongside other data scientists and data analysts to:

Build analysis and information products to help decision-makers understand their day to day reality, and help them plan and prioritise the most impactful next steps.

Build models of our hospital's interactions in code, so that we can simulate and iterate our way through options together quickly and cheaply.

Contribute to the modelling we do to support our annual planning process, which aims to achieve a 3-way balance between patient activity, budget, and available workforce.

Build tools and infrastructure to help us make our data work faster, more efficient, and more repeatable.

As a Band 7 Data Scientist you will probably:

Prefer to work in either R or python (we use both, as needed), and be familiar with collaborating with other team members using git.

Have practical experience of applying things like machine learning, statistics, data wrangling, and dashboarding to real-world problems.

Be familiar with communicating technical results to non-technical audiences, including making recommendations where supported with data.

Working for our organisation

With over 19,000 staff, we are one of the biggest employers in the city with a central role in supporting the health and wellbeing of our local population. We play a leading role in research, education and innovation.

Come and join our wonderful team at NUH. We are big believers in diversity and welcome new ideas to help develop our team in order to deliver world class healthcare to the vast patient populations we serve. With endless personal development opportunities available, at NUH we will endeavour to turn your job into a career!

We particularly welcome applications from people who identify as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, or Disabled, as we are striving to be better represented at NUH.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

See the attached file for the detailed job description.

If you have used LLMs (eg. ChatGPT, Claude, etc) to prepare your application, please say so in the application. Any applications containing obvious and undeclared use of LLMs will be rejected.

Please note this is a hybrid role, and interviews will take place in person at Queens Medical Centre, Nottingham.

Person specificationTraining & Qualifications

• Masters level qualification or equivalent experience in relevant numerical field
• Evidence of continued personal development
• PhD in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science or other relevant field
• Professional registration with relevant body (e.g. AphA)

Experience

• Experience of applying Data Science techniques to real-world datasets (e.g. Machine Learning, Time Series Forecasting, Statistical Modelling, ...).
• Experience of developing and maintaining code using Python, R, or similar
• Experience of using Git to collaboratively develop and maintain code.
• Experience of interpreting, analysing, and presenting complex information to technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience of applying Data Science to real-world healthcare datasets (particularly hospital activity datasets).
• Experience in an Information/Analytics role in the NHS/Healthcare sector
• Experience in developing tools using Business Intelligence software (e.g. QlikSense, PowerBI, Tableau)
• Experience of working in a service improvement setting and applying service improvement and quality management tools.
• Experience in mentoring/coaching junior analysts/data scientists

Analytical and Judgement skills

• Ability to recognise and exploit business opportunities to ensure more efficient and effective ways to use data science.
• Ability to apply scientific methods through experimental design, exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing to reach robust conclusions.
• Professional approach to documentation of chosen methodology, code, and findings.
• Demonstrate strong intellectual curiosity with an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on innovation in academia and industry.
• High level of technical competence and understanding of relational databases (e.g. MS SQL)

Communication and relationship skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to communicate potentially contentious or sensitive analytical issues to stakeholders at various levels

Planning and organisation skills

• Ability to manage a series of concurrent and consecutive pieces of work.
• Ability to organise pieces of work involving input from other people, to ensure completion in a timely manner

___________________________________________________________________________________

Come and join our wonderful team at NUH. We are big believers in diversity and welcome new ideas to help develop our team in order to deliver world class healthcare to the vast patient populations we serve. With endless personal development opportunities available, at the NUH we will endeavour to turn your job into a career!

We particularly welcome applications from people who identify as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, or Disabled, as we are striving to be better represented at NUH.

Applicants are kindly requested to refrain from using AI at any stage during the recruitment process.

Closing Dates: Please submit your application form as soon as possible to avoid disappointment; we reserve the right to close vacancies prior to the published closing date if we receive a sufficient number of completed application forms.

Communication: All communication related to your application will be via the email address you have provided. Please ensure you check your email account including your junk email regularly.

NUH are now able to offer application completion support and interview preparation support. Please follow the link to book onto our sessions: Support for NUH Job Applications

If you are aged 16 or 17 and applying for a role that is more than 20 hours a week, please be aware that you will be asked to commence an Apprenticeship within the Trust alongside your role, as long as there is a suitable apprenticeship standard available. This is in line with the current guidance in England that whilst young people under the age of 18 can leave school (on the last Friday in June) they must then do one of the following:

• Stay in full-time education, for example at a college
• Start an Apprenticeship
• Spend 20 hours of more a week working or volunteering, while in part-time education or training

Salary:The quoted salary will be on a pro rata basis for part time workers.

Disability Confidence:All applicants who have declared a disability and who meet the essential criteria for the post will be shortlisted.

At Risk of redundancy:NHS employees within the East Midlands who are ‘at risk’ of redundancy will be given a preferential interview where they meet the essential criteria of the person specification.

ID and Right to work checks : NUH authenticate ID and right to work documentation including passports and driving licenses through a system called Trust ID. NUH will scan your ID and right to work documentation in to the Trust ID system at your face to face ID appointment. The system will run a check against the key security features within your documentation. The system will provide us with an outcome of your check which will be stored securely on your personal file along with all other pre-employment check documentation.

Consent:

• Transfer of information: If I have previous NHS service - I consent to the transfer of my Electronic Staff Record (ESR) data between this and other NHS Trusts. I also consent to theOccupational Health Departmentconfidentially accessing my occupational health records from my current or previous employer in order to check the status of my vaccinations, immunisations s and screening tests as relevant to the post. I understand this is an automated process and the information will only be used for these purposes prior to me taking up the position at NUH.
• Disclosure and Barring Service: Your post maybe subject to a DBS check which incur a cost dependent on the level of check required (£49.50 for enhanced and £21.50 for standard). I agree to reimburse Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust the cost of a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check if it is required (by deduction from first month’s pay). Should I decide to withdraw from my job offer, I agree to reimburse Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust the cost of the DBS check undertaken by cheque or other agreed method.

For more information about our organisation and the career opportunities available, please visit our website and/or follow us on Instagram , Twitter andFacebook

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