This course is aimed at clinical colleagues with little or no experience of programming. You might be a doctor or a nurse, a pharmacist, therapist or healthcare scientist and if you are anything like me, you are probably using Excel to manage your patients and your services. There is no getting away from just how useful and powerful it is.

During this course, I assume no programming knowledge. We start together from the absolute fundamentals, with each lesson building on the key concepts learnt in the lesson before until by the end of the course, you can confidently program Excel at an advanced enough level to automate many of your key clinical processes, reduce the risk of manual transcription errors and standardize key tasks. You will:

• Learn Excel VBA programming from complete beginner to advance levels to help you automate your clinical processes

• Learn how to set up your Excel environment for programming

• Learn how to record and edit macros using a clinic schedule creator as a working example

• Master all Excel objects, including the Cells, Range, Selection, Rows, Columns, ActiveWorkbook, ActiveSheet, Sheets, ActiveCell and Application objects

• Develop a full understanding of Variables, including how to name them, how to use them and how to exploit their scope

• Become an expert at applying your Boolean Logic skill to Excel programming using Organ Transplant Rejection as an example

• Master the Comparison Operators (Equal to, Not Equal To, Greater Than, Less Than etc.) by applying them to the management of patients on the kidney transplant waiting list

• Learn the basics of Mathematics in Excel VBA programming by calculating Mean Arterial Pressure, Pulse Pressure, BMI and Medication Prescription doses

• Master Conditional 'If Then Else' Statements and 'Select Case' Statements by using a falling patient platelet count (thrombocytopaenia) to trigger clinical actions

• Develop a detailed understanding of the 'For Next' and 'For Each' loops by using patient white blood cell count (WBC) to trigger clinical actions

• Develop an appreciation of the similarities and differences between the 'Do Until' and the 'Do While' loops using patient white blood cell count (WBC) as a setting

• Take your Excel VBA Programming to the next level by exploiting Sub Routine and User Defined Functions

• Learn how to display helpful messages to users using the 'Message Box' and learn how to take input from users using the 'Input Box'

• Master the art of untangling unstructured clinical text with advanced text (string) manipulation techniques

• Master the art of triggering clinical actions by manipulating Dates

• Learn how to open, manipulate and close Excel Files through Excel VBA programming

• Use a list of Diagnoses to learn how to open, read from and write to text files using nothing but Excel VBA programming

• Take your Excel Variables knowledge to the next level by learning all about Arrays, including Static, Dynamic and Two Dimensional Arrays

• Master the art of writing Excel VBA programmes that are robust and that handle errors and unexpected inputs gracefully

• Consolidate your knowledge with multiple worked examples all from a clinical setting!