Research Fellow in Public Health Data Science

We seek an ambitions researcher who would relish joining a team working together to share skills and knowledge to develop diverse, qualitative and quantitative methods to enable wider use of a unique population level linked data resource to inform policy, services and practice. This post will contribute to the HOPE Study (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/child-health/hope-study), a collaboration between UCL Institute of Child Health, the University of Cambridge and University of Exeter. The post will: • Use linked education, health and social care data to develop cohorts and health indicators and validate the likely need for SEND provision at different levels • Use data-driven approaches to classify groups predicted to receive SEND provision and explore indicators of severity. • Perform descriptive analyses using population and longitudinal data to validate groups in need of SEND, and validate health indicators of SEND need against expected rates, prognostic outcomes, and associations with known risk factors. • Determine variation in SEND provision between Local Authorities using regression models to identify risk factors for ‘unmet need’ and ‘excess provision’, modelling individual and LA-level risk factors for outcomes for health indicators of special needs. • Contribute to developing a framework report, to triangulate findings, strengths and limitations of the HOPE Study’s different methods to inform how administrative data could be improved to support future evaluations, policy and services. Produce peer reviewed publications and present findings at national and international conferences. Interviews for this post are likely to be held on 19th September. This post is funded until 31 July 2024 in the first instance.
About you
The HOPE Study is exploiting a novel linkage of administrative data from hospitals and schools for all children in England (the ECHILD database (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/child-health/echild) to address two aims: 1. To investigate the impact of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision on children’s health. 2. To establish methods, tools and exemplars for ongoing evaluation of the inter-relationships between SEND provision and health. Meeting these aims will improve the understanding of the impact of SEND provision in schools on health outcomes and drivers of educational outcomes. The research is intended to inform decisions made by policy makers, service providers, practitioners across health and education, children and families, and researchers. Members of the team have in depth knowledge of education or health services, or of analysing national data from one of these sectors. The HOPE Study aims to build the capacity, methods and tools to continue and extend research for children across education, health and social care, using linked national data such as the ECHILD database. The post holder will benefit from working within a critical mass of analysts working in Child Health Informatics (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/child-health/child-health-informatics-group) across UCL.
What we offer