Comfortable being uncomfortable and the rewards that come with it: A personal reflection on the ADR UK Datathon 2025

In this blog, Ioana Filipas, research apprentice at the Wales Centre for Public Policy, shares her experience of attending a datathon as part of the ADR UK Conference 2025.

If you’d asked me a year ago what ADR UK was, I would’ve shrugged and moved on.  Fast-forward 12 months, and not only do I feel immensely inspired by ADR UK’s mission and work, I also had the amazing opportunity to participate and be part of the winning team at ADR UK’s datathon 2025.

How did I end up participating in the datathon?

I’ve spent the last year as a research apprentice with the Wales Centre for Public Policy. As part of this scheme, I get to complete two work placements of my choice with organisations that feed directly into policy and decision making at a population level. As a result, while scoping out placement options, it was only natural to reach out to the ADR team in Wales given my deep interest in data and the valuable insights it can unlock into complex societal problems.

As part of my work placement with ADR Wales I signed up for the Data Collision: ‘where social meets health’ datathon hosted by Datacise Open Learning, which took place before the ADR UK Conference 2025.  I had never participated in a datathon before, and I was super excited to take part and to challenge myself. What followed were two (intense) days gathered around a table with our laptops and working alongside a team of bright, creative researchers motivated to give their best.

Brainstorming, mental gymnastics and walking a tightrope between innovation and pragmatism

The Datathon research question focused on the changes and associated impacts that young people experience in accessing mental health services when they transition from children to adult’s services. To address this, we had access to synthetic datasets replicating what would be available in the SAIL Databank. As it was a broad question, we had the freedom to choose how specific we wanted to be in our approach.

Day 1: the chaotic brainstorm fuelled by coffee and cake

The biggest challenge on the first day was to nail down our research question while taking into account our individual skills and experience. We had to walk a tightrope between coming up with an innovative approach to addressing our research question and being pragmatic about what was feasible given the short timeframe we had.

Day 2: the last-minute panic and big reveal

With fresh(er) minds, day two had a promising start: we had our final research question (which focused on mental health service continuation in looked after children), decided on the datasets and variables of interest and I started putting a slide-deck together ready for the big moment of the presentation to the judging panel, which was taking place in just over five hours.

When it came to the data linkage part however, we hit a wall – our linkage did not work (either due to an error in our approach or analysis, or due to the fact that the data used was low-fidelity synthetic data which is not meant to produce real-world results). So, for our presentation we chose to focus on the motivation for our research question (to better understand how looked after children access primary mental health services), its relevance to the Welsh context and policy priorities, and our analytic approach.

As time flew by, we stood in front of the judges running through our slides and the story we had spent the last two days creating. Following deliberation, we were delighted when our team was announced as the winner. The feedback we received on how we were able to clearly highlight the ‘why’ behind our research question reminded me that in a whirlwind of caffeine fuelled ideas and data dead-ends, a key value of data lies in being able to use it in a way that can have genuine impact on policy, which in turn can have a massive impact at a population level.

While intense and slightly manic, the ADR UK Datathon turned out to be extremely rewarding. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to step out of their comfort zone and connect with and learn from an amazing group of researchers.