Primary Care & Health Sciences

My association with Keele University began as an undergraduate in 2000, studying Law and Economics. After graduating, I undertook the MSc in Health Economics at the University of York, with the support of a Studentship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). My first academic position brought me back to Keele in 2004, working as a Research Assistant within the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre, in a position that formed the first stage of a long-term collaboration with the Health Economics Unit at the University of Birmingham (UoB). In January 2011, after a 12-month period as Research Fellow at UoB, I left the UK, moving to the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) to take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University (Canada).

During my time at Keele I completed my PhD under the supervision of Dr Martyn Lewis, Professor Stirling Bryan and Professor Elaine Hay. I remain an Honorary Research Fellow at the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Centre.

My research experience has been predominantly in the field of musculoskeletal conditions, including a number of randomised controlled trials and method comparison studies for alternative measures of health-related quality of life suitable for use in economic evaluation. However, I have been involved in projects covering a range of clinical and methodological specialties, such as costing studies for high dependency paediatric care and the ‘DIRUM’ project, a project funded by the Medical Research Council Network of Hubs for Trial Methodology Research (MRC HTMR) to compile a database of instruments for resource use measurement.

Currently, my research interests focus on the measurement of quality of life for individuals living with spinal cord injury, exploring the appropriateness of current accepted health-related measures and the feasibility and validity of new instruments that look to incorporate broader attributes to reflect non-health benefits that are attributable to health care interventions. As an aside to this, a constant research interest is the role of economic evaluation in the assessment of health care technologies and, specifically, the separate scientific paradigms of clinical and economic evaluation.

Selected publications:

• Whitehurst DGT, Noonan VK, Dvorak MFS, Bryan S. Preference-based measures of health-related quality of life in spinal cord injury research: a systematic review. Spinal Cord – published ahead of print, May 29, 2012

• Whitehurst DGT, Bryan S, Lewis M, Hill JC, Hay EM. Exploring the cost-utility of stratified primary care management compared with current best practice within risk-defined subgroups. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases – published ahead of print, May 14, 2012

• Whitehurst DGT, Bryan S, Lewis M. Systematic review and empirical comparison of contemporaneous EQ-5D and SF-6D group mean scores. Medical Decision Making 2011; 31(6): E34-44

The collaborative nature of the positions I held at Keele University and the University of Birmingham enabled me to gain a wide range of teaching experience. I was a lecturer and module co-ordinator on postgraduate courses for the MSc programmes run by the Health Economics Unit, University of Birmingham. In addition, I was able to provide teaching sessions on a variety of MSc/MBA/MMedSci and undergraduate courses across both UK universities (health economics and statistics). I continue to provide lectures and courses on the economics of health and health care at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.