As well as our essential work in education and career support for paediatricians, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) staff and members work on a range of programmes to improve child health - from quality improvement to workforce studies, from research in the UK to global child health programmes. RCPCH have developed, maintain and host a growing number of digital projects with the aim of improving the health and experience of care of children and young people, as well as the education and working environment of paediatricians. Below are some of the key repositories developed by the RCPCH.
The RCPCH has developed some digital versions of the paper child growth charts which have been in use for decades. To enable these charts to be work in a variety of use-cases, and to reduce development complexity, the dGC platform has been separated into a number of different repositories
These repositories are key to the functioning of the dGC platform.
rcpchgrowth-python houses the calculation functions of the growth charts in a Python package (which is also available on PyPi as a standalone python library)
digital-growth-charts-server is the RCPCH Growth API server, which uses rcpchgrowth-python internally to perform these calculations, which it serves as a REST API.
digital-growth-charts-react-component-library is a React Typescript component library which 'knows' how to display the results from the REST API, as a familiar digital growth chart.
digital-growth-charts-react-client is a React demo client available here. It has documentation for clinicians, implementers and developers.
digital-growth-charts-documentation contains all documentation for the Digital Growth Charts project and the Hazard Log for our dGC clinical service - and is where we can discuss and mitigate all aspects of the risks associated with the clinical software and its deployment.
digital-growth-charts-app is a Flutter app still in alpha that uses the Digital Growth Charts API. No growth references are bundled in, these are pulled down on use and persisted for the duration of the session.
These repositories are support services or ancillary services and data collections.
upptime-rcpch-web-services is a GitHub Actions-based uptime monitor to check the services are up, and display cumulative uptime.
growth-references is a repository containing the raw data from the statistical references which are used to generate growth chart information. It is mainly of interest to academics and stats nerds.
digital-growth-charts-react-native-client is a work in progress, pre-alpha React Native version of the charts display, which is designed to work better on smaller mobile screens. It was experimental and is not an official part of the project.
These repositories are deprecated and no longer updated.
rcpchgrowth-python-cli was a CLI tool built in Click which used the RCPCHGrowth Python package to calculate growth parameters on the command line. It was a thin wrapper around the Python package, and currently it is archived. If anyone is using it and would like to be its maintainer/developer then please contact us.
digital-growth-charts-react-client-node-server this Node.js server was briefly used to proxy requests between the demo site and the live server API, in order to allow us to securely inject API access credentials into the requests. Now no longer used because Gravitee.io API Management platform is much better than the old Azure one, so we don't need this.
digital-growth-charts-flask-client this was the original Flask implementation of the Growth Chart API, which also at one stage included the display elements of the charts. We elected later to separate out the display from the API and also to replatform the API onto FastAPI.
digital-growth-charts-react-chart-library was the first version of the React charts, which were superseded by digital-growth-charts-react-component-library which allowed the charts to be shipped as a standalone React Component.
RCPCH now administer 2 national audit platforms on behalf of Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP)
The RCPCH Audit Engine is the data platform underlying the Epilepsy12 National Audit of Epilepsy Care (Epilepsy12). In time the project will contain more applications.
- rcpch-audit-engine is a Django application which manages the Epilepsy12 audit.
This is the data platform supporting the NPDA. It is currently in development and sits in its own project. In time it will included in the RCPCH Audit Engine
- national-paediatric-diabetes-audit is a Django application which manages the NPDA.
There are 2 services that are open access and unmetered. These are used to support the audits, but will power other projects in time
- rcpch-census-platform is a django rest framework project that holds data describing the lived environment of children and young people in the UK. Currently the main application returns indices of multiple deprivation scores and quantiles against a postcode. It holds some census data also about access to green space. It also provide map tiles of health deprivation and health geographies - see working demo, supported by this mapping library
- rcpch-nhs-organisations is a django rest framework project that provides lists of organisations that care for children and young people across the UK, including their organisational geography and relationships.
If you want to contribute to any of our projects, there is more information in our playbook on how to get involved.
