Mark Hanly
Mark is a Senior Lecturer and convenor on the course HDAT9700 statistical modelling II.
m.hanly@unsw.edu.au
What publication are you most proud of?
The paper that comes to mind is Modelling vaccination capacity at mass vaccination hubs and general practice clinics: a simulation study1 We started this paper in early 2021, when it became clear that vaccination hubs were going to be an important part of the COVID-19 mass vaccination program. At the time, there was limited information available on the logistics of delivering vaccinations at scale so in this study we used a special class of model—queue network models—to try to figure out the sweet spot between number of vaccinations per day, staffing levels and target processing times.
I love this paper because it was addressing a very real and practical question. To inform the analysis I spent time at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital COVID Vaccination Clinic speaking to the health staff preparing and delivering vaccinations to better understand the process we were modelling. I also presented the completed work to the NSW Health Sydney Local Health District, as they prepared to set up their mass vaccination hub at Olympic Park.
The other nice aspect of this paper was the many ways we made the work accessible. To accompany the analysis we developed a shiny app that allows users to rerun our models, or to run alternative queuing models based on their own circumstances (number of staff, target daily vaccinations etc). As a companion to the academic paper, we also published an article in The Conversation to help share the lessons from our work as broadly as possible. Finally, all of the code from the analysis was made available on GitHub, following best practice for open science and reproducibility.
What’s the most important take home message from your course?
In Stats Modelling II we cover a range of modelling techniques but the modelling approach always depends on the question and the data. So I’d say the most important lesson is that before doing any analysis you need to be able to fully articulate your research question and understand the available data source.
If you could go back in time, what bit of advice would you give to yourself as a student?
Hmm. I studied maths and statistics in a way that was almost entirely chalk-and-talk. I would say, learn the stats software at the same time—that’ll make the theory easier!
Who would play you in the biopic of your life?
Footnotes
Hanly M, Churches T, Fitzgerald O, Caterson I, MacIntyre CR, Jorm L. Modelling vaccination capacity at mass vaccination hubs and general practice clinics: a simulation study. BMC Health Services Research. 22, 1059 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-022-08447-8↩︎