New Perspectives on Data Analysis for Global Health

The world has been changing a lot in the past three decades, and it will change considerably more over the three decades to come. I have been a statistician for the best part of those three decades, using quantitative methods to analyze and understand global health data. Now, 30 years after I started working in this field, I see new opportunities to present what I have learnt, at the same time as many of the academic institutions and systems for presenting our work have begun to fall apart. For this reason, I have begun this website in the hope of describing some of my experience of data analysis and quantitative methods in global health, and the meany things I have learnt - and continue to learn - through my work as a statistician in global health.

I work primarily in global health, where public health intersects with the data that nations keep on their own and each others' health, and where statisticians attempt to use national data to understand how health is changing, how government policies and interventions can improve health, and how the future can be better. At the heart of global health is the World Health Organization (WHO), which acts as the guide and coordinating body for al the world's governments and many of its public health institutions, private and public. Academics such as myself provide information to this machinery of global health primarily through publishing articles in the major journals of this field, such as The Lancet, The BMJ, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and other highly-regarded international journals. However, the traditional academic publishing model has been falling apart over the past decade, a decline that has accelerated and become an inescapable challenge to the work I do. The big publishing houses have given up on any social responsibility or commitment to the principles of this field, and now they operate as a kind of mafia or cartel, with little ethical commitment to the world we are trying to build.

For this reason we need new ways and methods of presenting our ideas and the things we learn, new ways of sharing our understanding of global health with the world, and at least some alternatives to presenting our research than simply sharing links to our articles on social media. I hope to do some of that here, in this website. I hope you all will be able to learn something with me, and that in its own tiny way this website will help us all to make progress towards the promise of Health for All.