Loading report data
Load live report data¶
load_reports() is the quickest way to access PFD reports. While before, researchers would have to manually download reports one-by-one, this function allows users to immediately access all reports.
The function returns a pandas DataFrame, with each row representing an individual report and the columns representing the main report sections.
from pfd_toolkit import load_reports
# Load all PFD reports from January 2024 to May 2025
reports = load_reports(
start_date="2024-01-01",
end_date="2025-05-01")
reports.head()
| url | date | coroner | area | receiver | investigation | circumstances | concerns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [...] | 2025-05-01 | A. Hodson | Birmingham and... | NHS England; The Rob... | On 9th December 2024... | At 10.45am on 23rd November... | To The Robert Jones... |
| [...] | 2025-04-30 | J. Andrews | West Sussex, Br... | West Sussex C... | On 2 November 2024 I... | They drove their car into... | The inquest was told t... |
| [...] | 2025-04-30 | A. Mutch | Manchester Sou... | Fluxton Road Medical... | On 1 October 2024 I... | They were prescribed long... | The inquest heard evide... |
| [...] | 2025-04-25 | J. Heath | North Yorkshire... | Townhead Surgery | On 4th June 2024 I... | On 15 March 2024, Richar... | When a referral docume... |
| [...] | 2025-04-25 | M. Hassell | Inner North Lo... | The President Royal... | On 23 August 2024, on... | They were a big baby and... | With the benefit of a m... |
If you don't pass start_date or end_date parameters, load_reports() will pull the entire collection of PFD reports.
Note
Please note that the date ranges denote when the report was published, not the date of death.
Get n latest reports¶
Optionally, use n_reports to trim the DataFrame to the most recent n entries. For example...
...loads the 1000 latest reports.
You can combine this with the date parameters to get the most recent n entries within a given date range.
Refresh reports¶
Reports are updated once a week (Monday 1:00am, universal time). load_reports() caches reports for faster loading, so to retrieve the latest reports you may need to set refresh to True:
Note
The dataset loaded when you call load_reports() is cleaned and fully processed. This means spelling and grammatical errors have been corrected and boilerplate text removed.
If you wish to load an uncleaned version of the dataset, we suggest running your own scrape via Scraper.