EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Data Science

The UK is a global leader in health research and healthcare technology. It is one of the most important sectors in our economy, and the largest in terms of commercial expenditure on research and development. It is also critical to the future of our health service: we need new ways of diagnosing and treating illness, new ways of delivering care, and new ways of planning for and dealing with challenges such as the recent pandemic. To maintain this leading position, the UK needs more healthcare data scientists. It needs data scientists who can advance the state of the art in computer science, statistics, and engineering in support of health and healthcare transformation. These scientists need to have an excellent understanding of the application domain: that is, they need to understand the fundamental features of health data, how to manipulate and model it, draw conclusions from it, and explain the resulting insights to stakeholders. They need also to know how to behave responsibly and ethically. For example, the methods and tools that they produce, and the research that they conduct, should take proper account of the variation and diversity in our population. Above all, they need to know how to work effectively with people from different backgrounds: health professionals, health researchers from academia and industry, patients, and the public. The Oxford EPSRC CDT in Healthcare Data Science will provide the research training that turns talented science graduates into this kind of data scientist. Supporting the EPSRC strategic delivery plan in the research priority area of transforming health and healthcare, it will work in partnership with the NHS, with the UK Health Security Agency, and with a range of research groups and organisations in academia and industry, ensuring that students obtain the essential combination of scientific rigour and real-world experience. The training programme is cohort-based, meaning that students learn how to work together and support one another. This is essential feature: the challenges that we face can only be addressed through trust and collaboration. The programme is designed to be accessible to graduates in different subjects, and we will make efforts to ensure that the cohorts are diverse and representative of the UK. Our experience with the existing EPSRC CDT in Health Data Science shows that this approach works very well. Our students have developed new approaches using real data to solve important problems, and to deliver real benefit in terms of health and healthcare transformation.