CVD Prevent

CVD Prevent is an R package that provides a user-friendly interface to the NHS CVDPREVENT API. This enables analysts, researchers and healthcare professionals to access and work with England-wide primary care cardiovascular disease (CVD) audit data directly from R.

The Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Audit (CVDPREVENT) automatically extracts routinely held GP data. The Data & Improvement Tool provides open access to the data, with clear, actionable insights for those tasked with improving cardiovascular health.

Features

• Simple R functions to make API requests and retrieve CVD indicator and area data
  
• Tidyverse-friendly outputs (mostly tibbles)
  
• Support for listing indicators, metrics, time periods, areas and more
  
• Helper functions for searching and exploring heirarchical NHS area structures
  
• See full API documentation for endpoints and reference

Installation

You can install the latest development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("craig-parylo/cvdprevent")

Or install the latest stable release from CRAN:

pak::pak("cvdprevent")

Getting started

library(cvdprevent)

# List all available indicators (first 4 shown)
cvd_indicator_list() |> head(4)
#> ✖ Validation error: time_period_id - time_period_id is required but missing
#> # A tibble: 1 × 7
#>   context           error          status url   params resp  timestamp          
#>   <chr>             <chr>           <int> <chr> <chr>  <chr> <dttm>             
#> 1 validate_input_id time_period_i…     NA <NA>  <NA>   <NA>  2025-11-05 19:46:25

Typical outputs are tibbles, making them easy to filter and manipulate:

# List the latest four time periods for 'Standard' indicators
cvd_time_period_list() |>
  dplyr::filter(IndicatorTypeName == "Standard") |>
  dplyr::slice_max(order_by = TimePeriodID, n = 4) |>
  dplyr::select(TimePeriodID, TimePeriodName)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 2
#>   TimePeriodID TimePeriodName   
#>          <int> <chr>            
#> 1           26 To June 2025     
#> 2           24 To March 2025    
#> 3           22 To December 2024 
#> 4           20 To September 2024

See the package vignette for more examples and guidance:

vignette("using_cvdprevent", package = "cvdprevent")

Documentation

• Function reference: CVD Prevent Reference
  
• API details: CVDPREVENT API Docs
  
• See also: Detailed function overview

Dependencies

cvdprevent is designed to work seamlessly with the tidyverse, and depends on:

• httr2
• jsonlite
• dplyr
• purrr
• tidyr
• tibble
• cli
• glue

Install these with:

# install the packages
pak::pak(c(
  "httr2",
  "jsonlite",
  "dplyr",
  "purrr",
  "tidyr",
  "tibble",
  "cli",
  "glue"
))

Contributing

Contributions, suggestions or bug reports are welcome! Please:

• Submit issues or pull requests via GitHub Issues
  
• Follow the function documentation style (see source files)
  
• Add examples and tests for new functionality

License

This package is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Acknowledgements

• NHS England - CVDPREVENT Audit Team
  
• CVDPREVENT API Documentation

For more information, see the package website or the API documentation.