Profile: Professor Diana Elbourne
Professor Diana Elbourne from the Medical Statistics Unit talks about her career and research
"Like many in the School, I do not have a straightforward background. Indeed, the Medical Statistics Unit (MSU) is not the most obvious place to find someone whose first degree was in Sociology. Whereas there exists a tradition of quantitative sociology (although this is not the branch of sociology in which I am most interested), I haven’t come across many qualitative statisticians. I used this apparent oxymoron in the title of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Healthcare Evaluation. However, I do not find it a contradiction. My main interest as a statistician is in randomised controlled trials (RCTs), and such trials take place in the social world. So I find it immensely logical to explore that context. This has led to a series of papers with colleagues Claire Snowdon and Jo Garcia on the views of participants in RCTs – about randomisation, about the concept of equipoise, about feedback of the results of a trial, and most recently about the views of pathologists, neonatologists and bereaved parents about post-mortem (PM) pathology studies within RCTs. This suggests that bereaved parents of babies involved in clinical trials may be more willing to agree to their children undergoing PM examinations than doctors believe them to be. As a triallist I work with a highly experienced team in the MSU to co-ordinate the non-clinical aspects of a number of RCTs. These are multicentre and include trials in neonatology (some of which relates to my previous work in the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, before I came to the School), adult intensive care and liver transplantation.
The latter was able to show that the choice of initial immunosuppressant can have major implications on the rate of deaths and the need for retransplantation. A new trial of fish oils to try to prevent or delay dementia or retinal problems in elderly people has just started recruitment, and includes collaboration with three units in the School.
For trials to be useful, they need to be done well and so I have a particular interest in the conduct of trials. This has involved work on the role of Data Monitoring Committees, and on the CONSORT guidelines for the reporting of trials. I have recently published a variant of these guidelines for a particular type of trial design in which groups or clusters of individuals are randomised to different treatments. These cluster RCTs are an area of work in which the School is a major player.
In addition to RCTs themselves, I have long been an advocate of systematic reviews, both of RCTs and also more recently of other types of studies too. This has led to my involvement with the International Cochrane Collaboration, the Campbell Collaboration, and latterly at the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordination Centre in the Institute of Education where I have a joint appointment.
I am delighted to be member of the Steering Committee for the newly established Centre for the Evaluation of Public Health Interventions. In this way I am finding out about the exciting range of applied and methodological research that goes on in the School in this area. The intellectual rigour of the research, and the enthusiasms of the people who conduct it, help to make the School a hugely invigorating place in which to work."
