Keynote Speaker
Professor Martin Bland
Department of Health Sciences,
The University of York
https://hsciweb.york.ac.uk/research/public/Staff.aspx?ID=129
Martin Bland joined the University of York as Professor of Health Statistics in 2003. Before this he spent 27 years at St. George's Hospital Medical School, University of London, following posts at St. Thomas's Hospital Medical School and in industry with ICI. He has a B.Sc. in mathematics, a M.Sc. in Statistics, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology. He is the author or co-author of An Introduction to Medical Statistics, now in its third edition, and Statistical Questions in Evidence-based Medicine, both Oxford University Press, 190+ refereed journal articles reporting public health and clinical research and on research methods, and, with Prof. Doug Altman, the Statistics Notes series in the British Medical Journal. He is currently working on clinical trials in wound care, hazardous alcohol use, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke prevention. His personal research interests are in the design and analysis of studies of clinical measurement and of cluster randomised clinical trials. His 1986 Lancet paper with Doug Altman on statistical methods for assessing agreement between two methods of clinical measurement has now been cited more than 13,000 times and is the most cited paper ever to appear in the Lancet and has been reported to be the sixth most highly cited statistical paper ever.
Guest Speaker
Joanne McKenzie
School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine,
Monash University, Australia
Joanne McKenzie is a senior research fellow at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, Australia. She holds a Master of Science from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and is currently undertaking a doctorate on methodological issues associated with continuous outcomes in randomised controlled trials and meta-analysis. She is also undertaking research investigating the conduct and reporting of randomised trials and is interested in methodological issues associated with cluster trials; in particular issues associated with their incorporation in systematic reviews. She is the statistical editor of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group and Co-convenor of the Cochrane Statistical Methods Group.
Joanne is the statistical investigator on several cluster randomised trials (C-RCT) set in both primary care and public health. Three of these trials aim to assess the effectiveness of interventions to improve clinicians' adherence to evidence-based clinical practice guidelines in general practice and allied health. One trial aims to establish if the provision of hand sanitizers in primary schools is effective in reducing absence episodes due to illness in children.