Events

Transforming Population Health: Realising the Potential of Population Cohorts

The speakers will share their experiences and insights on establishing and maintaining population cohorts, including data quality, participant engagement, and long-term funding. They will discuss the ethical and regulatory considerations to use population cohort data, and the need for transparency and accountability in data sharing.

Staff Research Rounds – Prof Fraser & Dr Ferretti

You are cordially invited to the ON-SITE SSHSPH Staff Research Round. We look forward to your attendance and we hope for an interesting discussion. Title 1: Epidemiology of digital contact tracing and the NHS COVID-19 app: design, evaluation & future consideration (Prof Fraser) Title 2: Digital measurements of exposures and transmissions from the NHS COVID-19 app: insights on individual risk and epidemic dynamics (Dr Ferretti)

Development and validation of clinical risk prediction models for rare outcomes

Risk prediction models are frequently developed in clinical research to predict patients’ future health outcome such as death or state of illness due to disease and/or to classify patients into clinical risk groups (low, medium and high). Predictions from these models are useful to make joint decision with both patient and clinician for future course of treatment. However, clinicians will be reluctant to use these models unless they can trust on predictions. To maximize the prediction accuracy and clinical utility of these models, it is essential to confirm that the models are rigorously developed and validated and evaluated. However, the standard process of model development and validation faces serious problems when the outcome is rare. This talk discusses the methodological challenges and possible solutions of model development and validation for data with rare outcomes. Issues are discussed providing example of predictive models for binary and survival data separately and illustrating them using both simulated and practical data.

Can ‘harm minimisation’ ever be ethically justified?

Harm minimisation (HM) is a key aim of many actual or proposed public health policies (e.g. supply of clean needles/syringes for injecting drug users; drug testing at music festivals; promoting e-cigarettes over burning tobacco etc). In this talk I try and do two things. First, there is conceptual work to do. Can HM be clearly distinguished from related concepts such as harm reduction, harm prevention and harm avoidance etc? I will argue that it is important to be clear about what we are talking about. Second, assuming we have a clear concept of HM, where, if at all, is it justifiable to use it as a policy aim? I will argue that we should not have HM as an overall policy aim, as in at least some cases it makes sense to weigh the chance of harms arising from a policy against other important considerations (such as benefits). It looks as though cases where HM is most plausible as a policy aim are where people are held to be going to act in a harmful way anyway, and we seek to minimise the chances of (preventable) harm arising from such acts. I will explore the nature of this justification in two ways. First, we should note that it takes the form of a conditional, where the antecedent involves an empirical claim which may be contested. Second, it might be argued that HM necessarily involves complicity in harms that it would be better to prevent.

Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue: Overcoming Challenges with Smoking Cessation

Did you know that an average smoker loses about 14 years of life as compared to a non-smoker? One cigarette contains more than 7,000 chemicals, of which 1% are known carcinogens.

• Public Health Thought Leadership Dialogue

Infectious disease epidemiology research in Brunei Darussalam: Challenges and opportunities in a small country

Infectious disease research has received much attention in Brunei, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This seminar gives an overview of the health indicators and current research landscape in Brunei, with emphasis on infectious disease & epidemiology. I will also talk about my research experiences as a quite early career academic at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD), and what I’m going to achieve during my 11-month stay at SSHSPH, under Alex’s mentorship.