Salary: minimum £52,606 per year
Location: Public Health England, Colindale, London, NW9 5EQ
Duration: available immediately until 31 March 2022 in the first instance

A key consideration for policy-makers deciding on interventions against infectious diseases such as COVID-19 is cost-effectiveness: how much health will be gained by a particular intervention, and at what cost? This requires modelling to analyse data and examine potential intervention scenarios. An essential component of this analysis is measurement of the severity of the health-related quality-of-life impact of illness, and PHE is currently running a longitudinal study of the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on patients’ quality of life.

We wish to strengthen our capacity to do studies like this, and the particular focus of this role will be development of data analysis tools for assessing the quality-of-life impact of illness using standard survey instruments like the widely-used EQ-5D and SF-36 questionnaires. We have software to do this type of analysis, written by the researchers who use it, which we wish to develop into a user-friendly package so that more people in PHE (and other organisations) are able to make use of it. We also wish to integrate the software with other data pipelines, e.g. to link the results with bioinformatics to assess if different COVID-19 variants differ in the severity of illness they cause, and to link with records of specific symptoms reported by patients. The role of this post will be to do this development work and write training materials with worked examples.

This role involves engagement with intended users of the tool and so will provide an excellent opportunity to gain experience of multidisciplinary collaboration with clinicians, epidemiologists, health economists, statisticians, modellers, and decision-makers, as well as gaining insight into a range of the activities that inform health policy-making in the UK.

The postholder will work closely with Dr Frank Sandmann (PHE & LSHTM) and Prof Peter White (PHE & Imperial College London). The postholder will also work in collaboration with the new NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Modelling and Health Economics, a partnership of Public Health England, Imperial College London and LSHTM, which has development of operational modelling tools as one of its goals.

Enquiries can be directed to peter.white@phe.gov.uk