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 seven-year, million-pound project working to reduce health inequalities.
My team’s specialty is working with big, messy, high-security health and social care data. We create useful analysis for policy makers and care providers.
Get in touch if you’re interested in an academic + NHS collaboration! We’re always looking for partners in improving care.
Who Gets Treated First?
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 have a new briefing paper that describes inequalities in waiting times for hospital treatments – people who live in the most deprived areas and people from Black or Asian ethnic backgrounds wait longer for treatment.
We’ve also measured the consequences of longer waitlists within our NHS. We’ve found which medical procedures have patients who are using the most healthcare while they’re waiting.
This work lets us identify patients and procedures that could be priorised (to save patient suffering and to more efficiently spend NHS resources).
Come see me present this work at the Royal Statistical Society’s conference in Edinburgh!
Prevention versus Recovery
How do patients end up in hospital? Who comes as an emergency? Who is advised to come 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 recently published on patient pathways into and out of hospital. We found that pre-COVID, community medical centres were used primarily for preventative care, but they are now mostly used for older and sicker patients’ recovery after a hospitalisation.
This work highlights the loss of preventative care due to bottlenecks in the care pathway.
Children’s Mental Health
We have several studies looking 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 read our article on inequalities in children’s mental healthcare and on the mental healthcare of children at risk of significant harm
We show that prescriptions for mental health medications have increased steeply, and that younger children and boys are more likely to be rejected by mental health services. We also found that children deemed at significant risk of harm by social workers used five times more mental healthcare.
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 advocate 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 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
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