BeDMaSH

BeDMaSH is a GW4 funded network. A summary of the network's research focus can be seen here.

The GW4 partner link members are:

University of Bath: Dr Christos Vasilakis

University of Bristol: Professor Iain Gilchrist

Cardiff University: Professor Paul Harper

University of Exeter: Professor Martin Pitt

On 11th November 2015 we held our network launch event in Cardiff, with a series of short talks followed by group discussions. Over 60 delegates were present covering academia, NHS and Government interests.

Outputs

Videos of the talks are available on my YouTube channel (apologies for the poor sound quality in places)

A summary of the round-table group discussions is available here.

We also had an excellent Graphic Recorder (Helen from Scarlet Design Ltd) who captured in real-time key information from each talk. The final graphics are shown below (more detailed versions of each one are available here)

Many thanks to all of our speakers and delegates!

Residential Sandpit

In January 2016 as a follow-we ran a residential sandpit with a particular focus on modelling unscheduled care and modelling obesity. There were 19 delegates in attendance for the 3 days . Thanks to GW4 funding, we were able to award some funds to the best ideas that emerged from the sandpit and are currently being worked up into grant proposals in this emerging and important field of behavioural OR. Two subgroups have emerged:

1. Methodological developments - an EPSRC proposal "CHOICE: Change in Health related behaviour Over time In Complex Environments" on novel methods development to integrate agent based models and accumulator models into a single conceptual framework. The need for such a framework is driven by the notion that individuals do not make decisions in isolation from other individuals and the environment; so how do the decisions made by individuals impact other individuals and, in turn, feed back into their own decisions?

2. Implementation - a study of how to embed modelling in health services and advance our understanding of how behavioural factors affect the conduct of, and interaction with, model-based processes that support problem solving and decision making.

A further meeting was held in Bath in April that enabled the methods team to start work on the EPSRC proposal, the implementation team to begin to map out a proposal and identify a suitable potential funder, and for the network as a whole to bid for follow-on GW4 Accelerator funds.