The coronavirus is putting the Portuguese NHS under a lot of pressure. Using public data from “Portal da Transparência do SNS”, I’ve found out that, the yearly accumulated extra hours worked in November was the highest the country has ever registered.

This is the kind of article that shows that a bit of data knowledge can give you a front page headline in a daily news newspaper. Because the government publishes the data by hospital, it becomes really hard to get the big picture if you don’t even know how to do pivot tables in excel.

Using tidyverse, I was able to perform the data transformations necessary fast enough to publish it in a day. A story that shows how important open data is to scrutinize public institutions and how knowing code can move things fast in the newsroom.