Gavin Rudge is a research Fellow in the School of Health and Population Sciences. He has 13 years experience in Health Services research and prior to joining the University had a career in the Health Service as an information analyst and a Clinical Audit manager.
His research interests are health geography, quality in healthcare and data mining.
He is currently involved in research in health and housing, mortality prediction using secondary care data and diffusion of novel technologies in medical devices.
Gavin has worked in the health sector since 1991, when he became a workforce analyst at the West Midlands Regional Health Authority. Drawing on earlier industry experience in quality measurement, he then joined the first wave of clinical audit staff employed in the NHS, first as a medical audit facilitator working with GPs in a Family Health Services Authority and then as a Clinical Audit manager in a community services provider trust. In this role he worked principally in adult mental health, but also in learning disabilities, community paediatrics and other community provided clinical services. He joined the Department of Public Health at the University of Birmingham in 2000 initially to work on a case mix measurement project drawing on his background in working with routinely collected data. He then went on to manage the West Midlands Accident and Emergency Surveillance Centre hosted here in the University and also ran the Regional ‘Safe Haven’ which was a programme to provide data and data analysis to the local health economy using access to the national secondary care database. This was supported by the West Midlands Levy Fund.
Since April 2011 he has worked in a team headed by Professor Richard Lilford here in the Department, which undertakes a wide ranging work programme in Health Services Research. See the section on resesarch for further details.
Health and Housing. Gavin is currently researching the impact of improvements in social housing in a deprived area of the region on health outcomes (funded by NIHR).
He is working on a project to assess the utility of routinely collected data sets to assess the diffusion of emerging technologies in medical devices (funded by NICE).
He has recently completed a population model of Accident and Emergency Department attendance in a large population which has been accepted for publication. It is expected to be published mid year 2013.
He is currently working on a novel approach to mortality prediction in secondary care.
Gavin’s interest in Geographical Information Systems leads to a number of requests for support in other research programmes where analysis and visualisation of spatial variables are needed or where skills in handling neighbourhood profiling data are required. In this capacity he advises or supports projects in a wide range of areas such as: medical education, childhood obesity, research into secondary care re-configuration, climate and health and synthetic estimation of deprivation in non-standard geographies.
The findings of the Mid-Staffordshire Inquiry do not uphold the use of hospital standardized mortality ratios as a screening test for 'bad' hospitals, Mohammed M; Lilford R; Rudge G; Holder R; Stevens A . QJM 2013; doi: 10.1093/qjmed/hct101
Which Is More Useful in Predicting Hospital Mortality -Dichotomised Blood Test Results or Actual Test Values? A Retrospective Study in Two Hospitals. Mohammed MA, Rudge G, Wood G, et al 2012, PLOS1 7(10): e46860. doi:10.1371
Benning A, Nwulu U, Ghaleb M, Dawson J, Barber N, Dean-Franklin B, Girling A, Hemming K, Carmalt M, Rudge G, Dixon-Woods M, Naicker T, Kotecha A , Lilford R. (2010) A controlled evaluation of the second phase of a complex patient safety intervention in English hospitals. BMJ. Accepted for publication November 2010
Mohammed MA, Deeks JJ, Girling A, Rudge G, Carmalt M, Stevens AJ, Lilford RJ. Evidence of methodological bias in hospital standardised mortality ratios: retrospective database study of English hospitals. BMJ 338:b780
Rudge G, Cheng K, Fillingham S, Cooke M, Stevens A.(2008) How has the extension of drinking hours in England affected patterns of Emergency Department use at a large urban hospital? Annals of Emergency Medicine 51:4, 553
Taylor J, Law G, Boyle P, Feng Z, Gilthorpe M, Parslow R, Rudge G, Feltbower R, (2008) Does population mixing measure infectious exposure in children at the community level? European Journal of Epidemiology 23:593-600
Downing A, Rudge G, Cheng Y, Tu YK, Keen J, Gilthorpe MS, (2007) Do the UK government's new Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) scores adequately measure primary care performance? A cross-sectional survey of routine healthcare data. BMC Health Services Research, 7:166
Downing A., Rudge G. (2006) A study of childhood attendance at emergency departments in the West Midlands region, Emergency Medicine Journal 23: 391-393