Dr Gary Abel

About me:

I am a Statistician working within Primary Care at the University of Exeter Medical School. I have a strong interest in routine data, both derived from primary care and other healthcare settings. This interest spans two approaches which are 1) using routine data to explore a variety of health research questions and 2) understanding the limitations of, and the interpretation of, routine data used to inform health service delivery.

Prior to joining the medical school in early 2016 I worked for the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research at the University of Cambridge. Before this I completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Prior to retraining as a statistician, I worked for 10 years as a physicist at the British Antarctic Survey and UCL where I also completed a PhD in space physics.

Interests:

My work has three broad areas of interest, the first of which is patient experience. This was founded on the NIHR funded programme grant IMPROVE where I was the lead statistician. IMPROVE had a focus on the GP Patient Survey particularly understanding how the data might be used and interpreted. I expanded my portfolio to work with the Cancer Patient Experience Survey – publishing over 50 papers derived from these two sources.

My second area of interest relates to the evaluation of different modes of service delivery. This has involved the evaluation of integrated care (National Integrated Care Pilots and the South London Integrated Care Pilot) and alternatives to face-to-face consultations such as the NIHR funded Telefirst project (co-applicant). I am currently a co-applicant on two NIHR funded projects, one focussed on online booking of appointments and another looking at digital facilitation.

My third area of focus is early diagnosis of cancer, largely in collaboration with Georgios Lyratzopoulos (UCL), funded by a series of awards from Cancer Research UK. Examining variability across the diagnostic pathway between patients in different groups, with different symptoms or cancers and between organisations has informed service improvement and intervention development. I am the principal investigator on the recently funded SPOCC NIHR Programme grant, a co-applicant on the CRUK funded international CanTest programme (testing for cancer in primary care) and the ERICA trial (testing risk assessment tools).

Across all three themes is a methodological interest in exploring and explaining the sources of organisational variation in performance. In particular, I am interested in how we quantify it and how misleading crude statistics can be.

Qualifications:

1995 BSc (Manchester)
1999 PhD (UCL)
2010 MSc (LSHTM)