Introduction to SQL for Healthcare Professionals

Learn how to retrieve, analyse and manage healthcare data using Structured Query Language (SQL). This practical course introduces SQL from first principles and teaches healthcare professionals how to query electronic health records and operational databases confidently.

Using realistic healthcare examples throughout, you’ll learn to extract meaningful information from relational databases and prepare data for reporting and analysis.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Understand relational database concepts.
• Write SQL queries confidently.
• Filter and sort healthcare data.
• Join multiple tables.
• Summarise data using aggregation functions.
• Create reusable queries for reporting.
• Apply SQL in healthcare analytics projects.

Course Modules

• Module 1: Introduction to Databases
  • Understand databases, tables, records and relational data structures.
• Module 2: Writing Your First SQL Queries
  • Learn SELECT statements and retrieve information from healthcare databases.
• Module 3: Filtering & Sorting Data
  • Use WHERE, ORDER BY and filtering techniques to locate relevant healthcare records.
• Module 4: Aggregating Healthcare Data
  • Calculate totals, averages, counts and summary statistics using SQL functions.
• Module 5: Joining Tables
  • Combine patients, admissions, laboratory and clinical datasets using joins.
• Module 6: Working with Dates & Text
  • Manipulate date fields and text values commonly found in healthcare data.
• Module 7: Subqueries & Views
  • Create reusable SQL queries and understand views for reporting.
• Module 8: SQL for Healthcare Analytics
  • Apply SQL techniques to infection surveillance, operational reporting and clinical audit.
• Module 9: Performance & Best Practices
  • Write efficient, readable SQL queries and understand basic optimisation.
• Module 10: Final Project
  • Complete a healthcare analytics project by querying a realistic clinical database and producing analytical outputs.

Skills You’ll Gain

• SQL
• Relational Databases
• Data Extraction
• Data Filtering
• SQL Joins
• Aggregation
• Database Querying
• Healthcare Analytics
• Clinical Reporting