Alex Bottle

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.

Publications

Journals

• Pollok RC, Jayasooriya N, Baillie S, et al., 2023, Letter: delays to diagnosis of IBD-Challenges requiring a systematic approach. Authors' reply., Aliment Pharmacol Ther, Vol:57
• Pollok RC, Baillie S, Jayasooriya N, et al., 2023, Letter: diagnostic delay in inflammatory bowel disease-Authors' reply., Aliment Pharmacol Ther, Vol:57, Pages:1205-1206
• Parnham JC, Vrinten C, Rado MK, et al., 2023, Multistate transition modelling of e-cigarette use and cigarette smoking among youth in the UK, Tobacco Control, ISSN:0964-4563
• Lai HTM, Chang K, Sharabiani MTA, et al., 2023, Twenty-year trajectories of cardio-metabolic factors among people with type 2 diabetes by dementia status in England: a retrospective cohort study., European Journal of Epidemiology, ISSN:0393-2990, Pages:1-12
• Jayasooriya N, Baillie S, Blackwell J, et al., 2023, Systematic review with meta-analysis: Time to diagnosis and the impact of delayed diagnosis on clinical outcomes in inflammatory bowel disease, Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics, ISSN:0269-2813