WMS » News

We are hiring! Research Fellow

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 14:13:00 GMT

Fixed Term Contract for 3 Years

We are looking for an aspiring Research Fellow to join a dynamic and growing team of health economists at one of the UK’s highest-ranking universities.

The work will primarily involve undertaking economic analyses within a broad portfolio of publicly funded research in health and social care. Applicants should hold a PhD (or have equivalent work experience) in health economics, economics or a similar relevant background. A strong, demonstrable interest in statistical and econometric methods applicable to economic evaluation and policy impact evaluation is essential.

In addition to working on funded research, the post holder will be encouraged to develop their methodological interests and will be supported with initiating research ideas, undertaking further training and acquiring skills to enable high quality empirical and methodological research in health economics.

The post holder will be part of the newly established Centre for Health Economics at Warwick, working within multidisciplinary teams including health economists, social scientists and clinicians to design research, undertake analyses, generate economic evidence and report findings on the broader value of health and social care interventions. Work undertaken is expected to be disseminated through impactful journal publications and reports, and to directly inform policy at both the national and international level.

Where you have not yet been awarded your PhD, any offer made to you will be an under-appointment to the post of Research Assistant at a salary of £30,046 per annum. Once your PhD has been awarded and you have evidenced this, you will be appointed to the substantive post of Research Fellow at a salary within the range shown above.

If you have any questions or would like to have an informal conversation about this vacancy please contact Dr Lazaros Andronis: L.Andronis@warwick.ac.uk, 02476 574490.

Interview date: w/c 16 November 2020

https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?owner=5062452&ownertype=fair&jcode=1872684&vt_template=1457&adminview=1

PhD poster wins WMS Virtual Postgraduate Research Symposium

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 10:01:00 GMT

We are delighted to say that Edmund, one of our PhD students, presented a poster at the WMS Virtual Postgraduate Research Symposium and came top in the Health Sciences/Clinical Trials Divisions! Well done Edmund and supervisors, a great achievement!

Lazaros Andronis wins a WATE

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 09:59:00 GMT

Congratulations to Dr Lazaros Andronis who was selected as a 2020 WATE (Warwick Awards for Teaching Excellence) winner. The team here at CHEW and wider Medical School are very proud of his achievements. You can read his interview about the award below and learn more about the awards here. Well done Laz!

Why did you start teaching? What (or who) inspired you?

I would have liked to say that teaching is what I always wanted to do, and that the first time I stood before students a childhood dream came true. When I was starting out in academia, I had a great deal of interest in research but little appetite for teaching. Like many of my colleagues, I wrongly saw teaching as one of the most intimidating and thankless parts of my research-focused job. But, over the years, lecture by lecture, teaching turned from frightening to bearable, to interesting, to exciting and eventually, to what I now see as one of the best parts of my job.

What pearls of wisdom have you been given over the years that have helped you with your teaching?

Make sessions interactive. Fortunately, long gone are the days when a typical lecture was an hour long, uninterrupted monologue. To teach is to engage and interact.

Is there anything you wish someone had told you when you started out?

For years, I was terrified by the prospect of being asked questions that I would not be able to answer. When I did get such questions, I felt like a failed academic and an imposter. I eventually came to realise that educators are not supposed to have all the answers, and that most students recognise this. I just wish someone had told me this earlier...

If you were mentoring a first-time teacher, what advice would you give?

In no particular order:

Observe and learn from others, but develop your own style.
As much as possible, get out of your comfort zone.
Take every possible opportunity to receive constructive feedback.

What advice/top tips would you give to more experienced teachers?

Make sure your teaching is evolving. The way people learn, and our understanding of it, has changed over the years, so sticking to what was the norm 20 or 30 years ago is unlikely to work nowadays.

What new technologies are you currently using to enhance your teaching? What are your top tips for using them?

I use Tabula, Moodle, TurnItin, and TalisAspire religiously and I keep an eye out for new software and applications. Last year, I used Prezi for most of my sessions and students, especially undergraduates, liked it a lot. I plan to use Prezi more in the future. Of course, one should be putting substance and content over style, and remember that software should facilitate, rather than dominate, a teaching session.

What does winning a WATE award mean to you?

A great deal. I am primarily a researcher but I feel that teaching is an important part of my academic identity. I know for a fact that there are many people like me at Warwick. To my mind, recognition through WATE sends a clear message that, at our University, being a researcher and a committed educator is not only compatible, but it is actually encouraged and celebrated.

What do you enjoy the most about teaching? What’s the best part of your job?

Without a doubt, the fact that I get to teach students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. The subject I teach, health economics, is just about as multidisciplinary as it gets and, nowadays, I get to teach health sciences students in Warwick Medical School and economics students in the Department of Economics, sometimes on the same day! The fact that some students come to class resolute that ‘health’ and ‘economics’ are terms that should not be even used in the same sentence is an additional challenge that I’m always happy to accept...

What lessons have you learned from your students?

To think about, and question, everything I teach. If theories or concepts—even well-established ones—do not make much sense to students, it is usually worth casting a critical eye over them.

If you could write a recipe for the perfect inspiring teacher, what ingredients would you need?

Enthusiasm, motivation, commitment, patience, openness, willingness to experiment and respect for all learners, all in equal measure.

Congratulations Dr Henry Nwankwo!

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:59:00 GMT

One of our Research Associates, Henry Nwankwo, has just heard that his minor corrections on his thesis on feasibility of using the ICECAP-SCM and other economic measures in patients with end stage organ failure have been approved - congratulations Dr Nwankwo!!

Helping set priorities in healthcare - introducing CHEW

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 08:34:00 GMT

At the beginning of 2019, those working or interested in health economics came together to form the Centre for Health Economics at Warwick (CHEW), led by its first Director, Prof James Mason.

Health economics is a relatively young but increasingly important discipline sitting at the interface between social and health sciences. While ‘health’ and ‘economics’ might seem disparate terms, many issues facing health care systems are fundamentally economic. How should resources be provided for an increasingly ageing population? How can we improve the efficiency of the National Health Service (NHS) without jeopardising access and quality of care? Which new expensive cancer drugs should be purchased and what other care will go unfunded as a consequence? Thus, health economists are tasked with helping governments at home and abroad to value and prioritise healthcare services and systems, using a specialised range of research methods and designs. We are also developing new approaches to incorporate wellbeing in economic evaluation.

CHEW helps the NHS to understand the value of new treatments, by contrasting evidence on their effectiveness and cost. We support the NHS and Warwick Clinical Trials Unit in evaluating new technologies, programmes and interventions in a wide range of fields. These include: social care, cancer, emergency and critical care, mental health, musculoskeletal disorders, rehabilitation, paediatrics and reproductive health. Sometimes these clinical trials involve old technologies being used in new ways and sometimes they are truly innovative. For example, rotator cuff tears of the shoulder are common, and sometimes irreparable leading to substantial pain and disability. The START-REACTS trial is evaluating a dissolvable saline filled balloon inserted surgically above the torn tendons to improve joint function, reduce pain and promote healing. The sensitive application of economic analysis within the NHS and the methodological challenges raised are a central theme for CHEW.

In the national context, Warwick Evidence help the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to assess the cost-effectiveness of new drugs seeking reimbursement. This includes detective work, assessing pharmaceutical company submissions to NICE seeking National Health Service (NHS) funding, by critiquing and re-evaluating claims of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Often these assessments become negotiations helping the NHS to secure new drugs at an acceptable cost reflecting their value.

Abroad, CHEW has a growing international research programme, with particular interests in infectious diseases and mental health. We work with a number of overseas universities, policy-makers, and funding agencies, to help decide the best way to invest limited health care budgets and meet ambitious goals such as Universal Health Coverage. Recent projects include the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Psychosis Outcomes, where we are developing tools to measure the financial impact of mental illness on vulnerable households in India, and the STREAM trial, where we found that shortened regimens for drug-resistant TB reduced health care costs in Ethiopia and South Africa, and allowed patients to return to work much sooner.

We are interested in policy evaluation methods and their use in understanding and evaluating governmental decision making, which requires drawing on broad economic toolbox. An example of this is supporting the policy decision made this summer to cease importing blood products into the UK for young patients, reversing the preventative policy implemented following the identification of CJD in 1996.

CHEW is an emergent and growing Centre, learning together and exploring new themes: in essence we research the socioeconomic value of health and healthcare, looking at how the valuation problem varies with context and addressing the measurement challenges of impact identification and valuation.

For more information about CHEW please contact Felicity Langer or see our website:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/med/research/hscience/healthec

PhD student Edmund has just passed the upgrade panel, marking the end of his first year

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:07:00 GMT

His PhD topic is about the derivation of a preliminary U.K. preference-based tariff for the Short Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (SWEMWBS) to allow calculation of Mental Well-being Adjusted Life Years (MWALY). The MWALY will be an alternative outcome measure to QALY and it will be used to capture mental well-being benefits in the economic evaluation of mental health promotion interventions. I will be doing different piloting phases during the PhD to validate the proposed methodology to derive the preference-based tariff.

We celebrated in the office with cakes this morning, congratulations Edmund!

Recruiting

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 10:46:33 GMT

Four new positions with fixed term contracts, each for 3 years in the first instance

Senior Research Fellows (Health Economics) £39,992 - £47,722 per annum or Research Fellows (Health Economics) £29,799 - £38,833 per annum

Following considerable success in the award of new research funding in the area of health economics, we are seeking to appoint to four new positions at either Senior Research Fellow or Research Fellow grade. You will join a rapidly expanding group of health economics researchers based at Warwick Medical School.

The four new post holders will contribute to a broad portfolio of health economics research that encompasses trial-based and modelling-based economic evaluations, systematic reviews, preference elicitation studies, and analyses of both cross-sectional and cohort study data using econometric techniques.

Further details on each of the four news posts, the job requirements and information on how to apply can be found in the attached file.

Informal enquiries are welcome and should initially be directed to Professor Stavros Petrou, S.Petrou@warwick.ac.uk or +44 (0)2476 151124, or Professor James Mason, J.Mason@warwick.ac.uk or +44 (0)2476 151853.

Closing date: January 15^th 2018

Interview date: January 29^th 2018

Seminar on Developing a research strategy to identify and evaluate tools for valuing the benefits from interventions aimed at supporting parents of neonates

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 08:09:20 GMT

This week the team invited collaborators from across the University and internationally to discuss the development of a strategy to evaluate and enhance wellbeing. The aim of the collaboration is to broaden the focus on health interventions to include wellbeing in public spending and healthcare. The intention is to secure future health by reacting to changes in wellbeing at an earlier stage. A potential focus for the research is the wellbeing of parents of neonates, which may impact children's development, education and future health.

The team includes researchers from accross the University: Sarah Stewart-Brown, Professor in Public Health; Fiona MacCallum, Associate Prof of Psychology; Eugenio Proto, Associate Professor of Economics; Jason Madan, Associate Professor in Health Economics; Stavros Petrou, Professor in Health Economics, and many more. The team also includes Mark Oppe, Senior Researcher EUROQOL foundation, Netherlands.

Congratulations, Ruth!

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 11:35:09 GMT

We congratulate Ruth Pulikottil-Jacob, who has been awarded the degree of PhD in Health Sciences for her PhD on the “Challenges encountered in the economic evaluation of medical devices”. Ruth was supervised by Jason Madan and Hema Mistry in the Division of Health Sciences. Both Jason and Hema are health economists at the Warwick Medical School.

Congratulations, Sungwook!!!

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:51:27 GMT

We congratulate Sungwook Kim on receiving confirmation that he has fully passed his PhD in May 2017. The team is very proud of you, Sungwook!!!

Sungwook passed his PhD on global donor’s activities on HIV issues. To read more on Sungwook, please visit our people's pages.