Plenary by Alec Morton :: Monday, July 5th
Alec Morton has degrees from the University of Manchester and the University of Strathclyde. He has worked for Singapore Airlines, the National University of Singapore, and the London School of Economics, has held visiting positions at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Aalto University in Helsinki, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, and the National Audit Office and is a member of the International Decision Support Initiative. His main interests are in decision analysis and health economics. His research is funded by the European Commission, the Department of Health, the Medical Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Chief Scientist's Office of the Scottish NHS. More details here.
OR in the fight against Covid-19: how have we done and what can we learn?
For almost all of us, the Covid-19 pandemic has been the most disruptive global event in our lives so far. Whether the pandemic will have any positive outcomes depends on whether we are able to reflect on and learn from it. This talk aims to serve as a stimulus to such reflection. As the lead editor of the special issue of Healthcare Management Science on Management Science in the fight against Covid-19, I have been privileged to have a unique viewpoint on how our discipline has been responding. In this talk I will outline a couple of case studies of how OR academics in my own Department have engaged with the health and care system in Scotland: supporting capacity planning for ICUs during the first acute outbreak of Covid-19 in Scotland and supporting decision making about policy restrictions in care homes in the months following. Building on the case studies and on the experience of the Special Issue I will offer my personal reflections on where we in the ORAHS community should be focussing our efforts to OR can maximise its contribution in the (hopefully) late phase of the pandemic, the post pandemic period and beyond.