I’m the Lead Data Scientist at NHS Grampian and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen.
Networked Data Lab
I run Grampian’s collaboration with The Health Foundation and four other NHS centres across the UK. This is a six-year project working to reduce health inequalities.
Our team’s specialty is working with big, messy, high-security health and social care data. My focus is creating useful analysis for policy makers and care providers.
Children’s Mental Health
We recently finished a big project working to understand inequalities in children’s mental healthcare.
Read a blog post about mental health prescribing to children. Or a post about children’s treatment by specialist mental health doctors. Check out our briefing paper for policy makers. Or wade into our academic research article.
Patient Pathways
How do patients end up in hospital? Who comes unexpectedly as an emergency? Who is advised to go by their GP? And where do people go when they’re released from hospital? Do they go straight home, or stay at a local care centre first?
We are studying patient pathways into and out of our hospitals. Knowing the answer to these questions helps tailor healthcare, which reduces stays in hospital and waits for people with scheduled care.
We’ll publish a briefing paper with our analysis combined with four other UK regions this autumn.
Waitlists
Millions of people are waiting for NHS care, they’re waiting longer than ever, and the waitlist is growing. How do we prioritise who gets care? How should the NHS spend it’s funding to shorten waitlists?
We’ve just begun to measure the consequences of longer waitlists within the NHS. We’re determining which specialties have patients who are using the most healthcare while they’re waiting. This will let us identify patients and procedures that could be priorised (to save patient suffering and to more efficiently spend NHS resources).
Public Health
I also make open-source tools about local communities and their needs for NHS Public Health.
Check out:
Poverty and emergency hospital admissions
Overcrowding and vaccine needs
Funding in priority neighbourhoods
Research Culture
I’m a huge nerd for open science and good research culture. Scientists should be (but aren’t) rewarded for doing rigorous science. I recently gave evidence about this to the House of Commons Science & Technology committee. You can also watch a spicy symposium I hosted: Academic Journals are Broken. Let’s Build a Better Scientific Record.
Data Provenance
In 2022, I finished a Wellcome Trust Open Research project to design safe ways to be open while using high-security patient data. We automated the capture and reporting of complex data provenance without compromising patient data privacy.
Contact
University website
Google Scholar
Orcid
Github
Bluesky
Mastodon
Twitter
