On Tuesday 13 September 2022, the
Medical Section of the RSS held a session titled “The future of applied statisticians working in fields related to medicine, health and social care”.
Professor Mona Kanaan, Professor at the University of York and chair of the Medical Section opened the session by briefly describing the objectives of the session.
The first part of the session was entitled “Professional Development and Recognition for Medical Statisticians” and the first speaker was Dr Gill Price of the Norwich Medical School University of East Anglia. Dr Price explained to the speakers that the RSS had conducted a survey in response to discussions that medical statisticians had been having at meetings concerning career development. Professor Mona Kanaan then presented results from the survey including a big thank you to the 335 individuals who participated. Dr Catey Bunce of the NIHR BRC at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Cancer Research then discussed findings both positive and negative and an interactive poll was conducted to indicate support for further activity in this area.
The second part of the session was delivered by Professor M. Dawn Teare of Newcastle University and was entitled “The Methodology Incubator: An NIHR supported initiative to increase applied methodologist research capacity”. Professor Teare spoke about the various workstreams that were operating within the methodology incubator and outlined the events that had been run to date and plans for the future and thanked all methodologists who had engaged with this initiative.
The final part of the session was delivered by Dr Lyn Taylor from PAREXEL (on behalf of Dr Hilary Alabi, ROCHE) and was entitled “2022 Launch of the Medical Statistical Apprenticeship Scheme”. Dr Taylor spoke about the English Medical Statistician Apprenticeship scheme that launched in 2022, which hopes to encourage more statistician graduates into medical research. See
https://psiweb.org/careers for more information on the scheme.
Written by Dr Catey Bunce