Summary
Many of us rely on our local hospital, but how do we know if it's safe? Or better than the other one down the road? Every year we expect our healthcare system to treat more patients with more problems and to ever higher standards. We clearly need useable information on performance. The NHS benefits from huge but complex databases, and it's my job to help doctors, managers and patients make sense of them.
After secondment to the public inquiry into the crimes of GP Harold Shipman, I devised the statistical methodology behind the flagship information tool of our former commercial partners, Dr Foster. With my analysis, this tool correctly identified Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust as having unacceptably high death rates and was a trigger for the national regulator to investigate. My research today continues to measure and monitor the quality of healthcare in hospital and in the community for patients with chronic disease, such as heart failure, osteoarthritis and COPD, or multiple conditions, using databases such as HES and CPRD. My heart failure work was cited in the 2019 NHS Long-term Plan.
Among my teaching roles, I am the Academic Lead for my "Statistical Analysis with R for Public Health" specialisation that's live on Coursera and is part of Imperial's online Global MPH. As a consultant since 2016, I train the UK public sector on statistical thinking and data analysis to improve staff effectiveness.
Please note that I am not taking on any more PhD students at the moment.
Publications
Journals
Faitna P, Hargreaves DS, Neale FK, et al., 2024, The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on 397,631 elective dental admissions among the under-25s in England: a retrospective study, Journal of Public Health, ISSN:1741-3842
Faitna P, Harwood R, Kenny SE, et al., 2024, Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the clinical management trends for acute appendicitis among the under-25s: a retrospective study, Archives of Disease in Childhood: Education and Practice Edition, Vol:109, ISSN:0003-9888, Pages:339-346
Bottle A, Kristensen PK, 2024, Variation in quality of care between hospitals: how to identify learning opportunities., Bmj Qual Saf
Selinger C, Bottle A, Lamb CA, et al., 2024, Evaluation of emergency hospital admissions for inflammatory bowel disease as a possible marker of quality of care of British IBD inflammatory bowel disease units, Frontline Gastroenterology, ISSN:2041-4137
Conference
Plumb W, Casale G, Bottle A, et al., 2024, Clinical pathway clustering using surrogate likelihoods and replayability validation, Winter Simulation Conference 2023, ACM / IEEE, Pages:1220-1231