Mr Alan Girling MA, CStat

• Chartered Statistician 1995
• Diploma in Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, 1972
• Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, 1973
• BA Mathematics, University of Cambridge, 1971

Alan Girling has a first degree in Mathematics and trained as a Statistician. Until 2003 he lectured in the Mathematics department at the University of Birmingham, researching mostly on methodological developments inspired by practical problems. He joined the department of Public Health and Epidemiology in 2004 to work in the MATCH collaboration – an EPSRC funded project based at Brunel University which also involves the Universities of Nottingham, Ulster and Birmingham. Here he has pursued ideas in the early-stage economic and business evaluation of medical devices, using Bayesian approaches to inform commercial development decisions. His role in MATCH has also entailed research collaboration and consultancy with large device manufacturers. At the same time, he continues to contribute as statistician to a number of medical studies.

Teaching Programmes

• Public Health MPH/Diploma/Certificate(and cognate Masters programmes in the department)

Currently supervising students in: the headroom method applied to the early-stage valuation of medical devices; and in a meta-analytic approach to the analysis of inter-country differences in the effectiveness of clinical treatments.

Since joining the department the over-arching theme of his research has been the application of mathematics and statistics to problems related to healthcare. Within MATCH (Multidisciplinary Assessment of Technology Centre for Health) this has included papers on economic evaluation in the development cycle for innovative medical devices (with a special focus on the role of Bayesian and Options-based approaches) and on patient preference in the evaluation of optional treatments – including the “Split-Choice” model for preference weights and the “True-Choice” model for sample-size calculations.

Outside MATCH, he has worked most recently on the statistical evaluation of the Safer Patients Initiative and as a grant-holder on the HTA BALLETS study (2005-2010) of liver function tests in primary care.

Further ongoing interests include: the special features and problems that arise in the evaluation of service delivery interventions; and the statistics of hospital league tables.