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RAG Repo

Fingertips (Public Health Data)

Fingertips is a sprawling public health data collection for England, run by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. It organises hundreds of indicators into themed profiles: the Public Health Outcomes Framework, mental health, child and maternal health, the wider determinants of health, health protection, and many more. Each indicator arrives with values split by geography (from all of England down to local authorities and GP-linked areas), by time period, and frequently by age, sex, or deprivation band.

Everything is designed for comparison, across places and across years. You can take the data as CSV downloads or through the Fingertips API, which has a companion R package, fingertipsR, if that is your working environment. For RAG the numeric, coded shape means the productive move is usually to turn indicator values into short factual sentences ("In [area], [indicator] was [value] in [period], against [value] for England") and embed those, so ordinary questions reach text the raw tables never expose.

It fits public health question answering for England especially well: local commissioning assistants, research and journalism tools, or dashboards that compare areas and track trends. Because the geographies are consistent, "how does my area compare" questions are simple to ground in the data.

The detail deserves attention. Indicators carry precise definitions and confidence intervals, some values are suppressed to protect small counts or flagged as provisional, and both boundaries and indicator sets change over time, so keep the period, the area code, and any data-quality notes fastened to every figure. Coverage stops at England. The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial and personal reuse provided you acknowledge the source.

Set it alongside NHS England datasets and ONS statistics when you need wider UK health context or the demographic denominators that put health figures in proportion.

ukpublic-healthstatisticsmental-healthopen-government-licence

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