Professor Sallie Lamb, Director of the Warwick Clinical Trials Unit, has been awarded £1.7 million from the National Insititute for Health Research's Health Technology Assessment for physical activity programmes for dementia sufferers.

About the Health Technology Assessment programme

The Health Technology Assessment (HTA) programme is part of the National Institute for Health Research. It produces independent research information about the effectiveness, costs and broader impact of healthcare treatments and tests for those who plan, provide or receive care in the NHS.

The HTA programme produces independent research about the effectiveness of different healthcare treatments and tests for those who use, manage and provide care in the NHS. It identifies the most important questions that the NHS needs the answers to by consulting widely with these groups, and commissions the research it thinks is most important through different funding routes.

It provides ongoing help and support for the investigators it funds, before publishing their findings in its internationally acclaimed journal series, Health Technology Assessment.

About Professor Lamb

Sallie Lamb is the Director of the Warwick Clinical Trials Unit at the University of Warwick, and also the Kadoorie Professor of Trauma Rehabilitation at the University of Oxford. Sallie qualified in 1986 from Salford School of Physiotherapy and has substantial clinical experience of working with frail older people. She was awarded an MSc in Rehabilitation with Distinction from Southampton University in 1991, and subsequently awarded the PPP Research Fellowship in Healthcare of Older People at the University of Oxford in 1991, where she completed a doctoral study of mobility limitation in frail older people under the supervision of eminent gerontologist, Professor Sir John Grimley Evans.

In 1995, she was awarded a Harkness Fellowship by the Commonwealth Fund of New York, to study fall and disability prevention in older people in the United States, and was appointed as a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Aging of the United States. This collaboration continues, and has resulted in substantial numbers of publications and joint projects. Sallie has subsequently studied Statistics at the University of Sheffield, and is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and on a part-time basis, the Director of the Warwick Clinical Trials Unit. In 2008 she was recognised a foundation senior investigator of the National Institute of Health Research in the UK, and of being within the top 200 investigators contributing to patient centred research in the UK. Sallie was appointed the Chair of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment commissioning board in 2009.

Sallie is a member of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence Guideline panel on hip fracture, and the international review panel for registration of UK Clinical Trials Units. She also sits on the NIHR Clinician Scientist Panel, and the NIHR Research Fellowship and Internship panel. Her interests in gerontology span understanding physiological mechanisms of mobility limitation, frailty and falls in older people, to developing interventions that can be applied to improve quality of life and function of older people who have multiple co-morbidities and cognitive impairments. These include exercise interventions to target the geriatric syndromes (falls, frailty, incontinence and depression), multi-factorial interventions for the prevention of falls and fractures, minimally invasive approaches to the management of severe injury and fracture in older people, interventions for osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and back pain, and studies to improve field testing and diagnosis of gait and mobility problems in older people.