Rate My Professor Alex Bottle

Alex Bottle is Professor of Medical Statistics in the School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, at Imperial College London. He earned his PhD in Epidemiology from Imperial College London from 1997 to 2001. As co-director of the Dr Foster Unit, established in 2002 within the Department of Primary Care and Public Health, he oversees the development of statistical methods to explain variations in mortality rates in acute hospitals and to process hospital episode data into performance measures for healthcare safety and quality.

Bottle's career includes a secondment to the public inquiry into the crimes of GP Harold Shipman, devising the statistical methodology behind the Dr Foster flagship information tool (now Telstra Health), which identified unacceptably high death rates at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and triggered a national regulator investigation. Since 2016, he has served as a consultant training the UK public sector on statistical thinking and data analysis to enhance organizational effectiveness. His research interests center on measuring and monitoring healthcare quality in hospitals and communities for patients with chronic diseases such as heart failure, osteoarthritis, COPD, or multiple conditions, employing databases including Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), and Discover. His heart failure research was cited in the 2019 NHS Long Term Plan. Bottle has authored 456 publications, including the book Statistical Methods for Healthcare Performance Monitoring (2012, co-authored with Paul Aylin). He holds editorial roles as Associate Editor of BMJ Quality & Safety (since 2020) and Deputy Statistical Editor of Thorax (since 2022), chairs the Faculty of Medicine's Information Governance committee, co-chairs the School's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee, and has served on committees such as the NIHR HS&DR Prioritisation Committee (2016-2020) and NHS Hospital Mortality Indicator technical group (2010-2013). A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2014 and Member of the Faculty of Public Health since 2014, he is Academic Lead for the Coursera specialization "Statistical Analysis with R for Public Health," part of Imperial's online Global Master of Public Health.