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Date posted: 31st January 2018. Details and links at findaPhD: https://www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=94732 Project Title: Using health informatics to improve neurological care Project Description: The impact of neurological disorders on individuals, carers, and the UK health economy is widely underestimated. There is a gap between the overwhelming level of outpatient demand and consultant neurologist capacity. In addition to making access to neurological care for patients more difficult and potentially inequitable – including those with mainly age-related neurodegenerative disorders, this gap puts significant pressure on key NHS service delivery targets. At least some service redesign is crucial to optimise the use of available capacity, but redesign is complex in healthcare systems, not least because of there being such a large number of stakeholders. Robust clinical engagement is required to effect meaningful change. Clinicians lack confidence in ‘high-level’ neurology service data, particularly when these have been generated without significant clinical and/or where there may be a lack of adequate validation. There is a pressing need to improve both the quality of data and the approach to its analysis. This project is directly linked to three of the Faculty of Health and Medicine’s core research areas, namely ageing, health information, computation and statistics, and inequality in health. The PhD fellow (from a clinical or non-clinical background) will utilise a dataset of several thousand outpatient prospectively recorded consecutive neurology clinic attendances. The PhD project will entail: • A systematic review of published studies of outpatient neurological services and other relevant studies. • Analysis of a routine outpatient neurology dataset pertaining to approximately 4,000 appointments, cross-linked to business intelligence data, enabling characterisation of the outpatient referral population, and an investigation of geographical, social deprivation and other factors impacting variations in care. • Derivation of generic and condition-specific minimum data sets, using epilepsy and neurovascular disorders as exemplars, leading to the design and piloting of online clinical and research registers for neurological conditions, using epilepsy and neurovascular disorders as exemplars. Applications: Complete an application for PhD Statistics and Epidemiology October 2018 through our online application system. Closing date: midnight 28th February 2018. Funding Notes: Awards are available for UK or EU students only for a maximum of three years full-time study. Awards will cover University Fees and Doctoral Stipend (2018-2019: £14,777). You may leave the list at any time by sending the command SIGNOFF allstat to [log in to unmask], leaving the subject line blank.