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Professor Neil O'Connell
Professor - Evidence-Based Healthcare
Mary Seacole 3rd Floor-Bay 19
- Email: neil.oconnell@brunel.ac.uk
- Tel: +44 (0)1895 268814
- Physiotherapy
- Physiotherapy and Physician Associate
Research area(s)
Chronic low back pain, chronic pain, evidence based practice, systematic reviews.
Research Interests
Neil's main research interest is in persistent pain, with a specific focus on evaluating the effectiveness of clinical interventions for people in pain. He is also interested in methodological aspects of evidence synthesis.
Research grants and projects
Research Projects
Grants
Funder: ERA-NET NEURON Cofund 2
Duration: September 2023 - August 2024
The personal, social and economic burden of chronic pain is enormous. Yet patients with chronic pain, clinicians and the public are often poorly served by an evidence architecture that contains multiple structural weaknesses which reduce confidence in treatment practice. Weaknesses include incomplete research governance, inadequate stakeholder engagement, poor methodological rigour and incomplete reporting, a lack of data accessibility and transparency, and a failure to communicate findings with appropriate balance (without spin). These issues span pre-clinical research, clinical trials, systematic reviews and impact on the development of clinical guidance and practice update. Research misconduct presents a further critical risk. Combined, these weaknesses serve to increase uncertainty in this highly challenging area of study and practice, drive the provision of low value care, increase costs and impede the discovery of more effective solutions. The central objective of our proposed network is to develop ENTRUST-PE, a novel integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of evidence for chronic pain. This will involve identifying and synthesising a range of available resources into a common framework that supports researchers, editors and publishers to minimise threats to the trustworthiness of pain research.
Funder: The Youth Endowment Foundation and the Campbell Collaboration
Duration: March 2022 - February 2023
Funder: Economic & Social Research Council
Duration: October 2021 - September 2028
Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council
Duration: -
Funder: MRFF the Australian Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Rare Cancers, Rare Diseases and Unmet Need
Duration: -
Funder: University of Oxford
Duration: October 2017 - September 2023
Funder: Macmillan Cancer Support
Duration: November 2015 - May 2016
Research links
Co-author network
- Prof Nana Anokye
- Prof Christina Victor
- Prof Meriel Norris
- Mr John Cossar
- Prof Louise Mansfield
- Dr Robyn Smith
- Miss Alex Harvey
- Dr Louise Forde
- Dr Daniel Bailey
- Dr Garcia Ashdown-Franks
- Visualise network
Similar research interests
Research group(s)
- IEHS