A picture of health

NICE guidelines, produced by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, are detailed, and sometimes lengthy documents. They are an attempt to summarise all available evidence on a health topic, supplemented by expert opinion where evidence is not available. The BMJ has recently been publishing quite a few summaries of these NICE guidelines, aiming to provide doctors with more accessible, easy to use resources. I've been making a few infographics too - mostly static ones that people can tear out and stick on their consulting room wall, or print from the website. One of the first ones I worked on was a bit special. The NICE guidelines on referral of suspected cancer were updated earlier this year, and I was asked to take a look at the tabulated data and try and turn it into something more visually appealing. I was presented with this (on a Wednesday evening)  - a series of tables detailing the advice on what to do when children present with some key symptoms:

A collaborative project from earlier this year that I enjoyed working on was The BMJ's investigation on the sugar industry, and links to UK government advisory panels. For this project I was working with a journalist, Jonathan Gornall, to co-create the graphic. The project started, as so many projects do, with several long tables of data - in this case Freedom of Information act requests, and publicly declared conflict of interest statements from different organisations: I initially began to explore a force-directed node diagram to try and see an overview of these complex links between organisations and individuals. I first tried a d3 layout, by d3noob:  http://bl.ocks.org/d3noob/5141278 https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56571574/sugar/index.html This version started to reveal important hubs, like the MRC and Susan Jebb, but it wasn't easy to see the detail beyond this. I edited the code, to freeze the dots in place when they were dropped, allowing me more c