Dear All,
you may remember sometime back I posed a question regarding the
destination of medical statisticians in the UK - many thanks for all who
replied and apologies to those I didn't respond to - and I now have a
related question. It's 'simply' this: how many medical statisticians
should an undergraduate medical school have? This is not an academic
question. The University of East Anglia has just been awarded funding for
a new medical school to open in two years time. This will take in 110
students per year and will be staffed by 80-100 academic staff, half of
which will be non-clinical. Are there any statisticians out there in
medical schools that could let me know how many of you there are per
student or other academic staff members (I've heard from Bristol - many
thanks Tim).
I would like to make a case for some of those non-clinical staff to be
medical statisticians. There are, I understand, posts identified in the
new school as 'non-clinical epidemiologist' but the term 'statistician'
doesn't, to my knowledge, appear anywhere. I believe that any stats
taught to undergraduate medics should be taught by statisticians. On the
whole, I feel their skill base is likely to be more comprehensive than
someone from another discipline that has picked up some stats along the
way and are likely to view the discipline of statistics as an integrated
whole rather than a bag of unrelated 'tools'. Also I feel that having a
statistician lecture medical students is very good for the working
relations between the two professions. The students will (hopefully!)
view a statistician as a natural member of any medical research team by
the time they get to doing research themselves if taught by a
statistician. Any other arguments in favour of having statistics taught
by statisticians as opposed to a more general 'non-clincial
epidemiologist' would be gratefully received.
Many thanks,
Lee
****************************************
Lee Shepstone,
Lecturer in Medical Statistics,
School of Health Policy and Practice
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|