Sally Brailsford

Sally Brailsford (born 1951) is a British professor of management science within Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on operational research and healthcare modelling to evaluate treatments and screening programmes, and to improve health service delivery.

Sally Brailsford
NationalityBritish
Alma materKing's College London
OccupationProfessor of Management Science
EmployerUniversity of Southampton
AwardsGoodeve Medal (Operational Research Society) in 2004, 2006, 2015; Companion of Operational Research (Operational Research Society) in 2016.

Early life and education

Brailsford was born in Cheltenham and studied at Pate’s Grammar School for Girls, obtaining A-levels in Pure and Applied Mathematics and Russian. She graduated with a First-class B.Sc. in Mathematics from King’s College London in 1973. Her interest in healthcare dates from this period, as she had a weekend job as a healthcare assistant at Whittington Hospital, London. After starting (and almost immediately giving up) a PhD in pure mathematics at Kings, she worked for ten months as an admin temp at the BBC World Service, managing the distribution list for its publication London Calling. In 1974 she resumed her Russian studies at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), gaining a Distinction in the Intermediate Diploma of the Chartered Institute of Linguists in 1975. For the following year she worked part-time at the Whittington while establishing a career as a freelance translator of Russian mathematical journals. In 1976 she moved to Hampshire, and completed two years of nurse training at Southampton General Hospital. She continued to work as a translator for eight years after the birth of her first child, and also occasionally worked as an agency nurse. In 1987 she gave up both jobs and returned to academia, obtaining an M.Sc. (with Distinction) in Operational Research from the University of Southampton in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the same institution in 1993.

Research career

Brailsford held a number of fixed term research posts in the Faculty of Mathematical Studies at the University of Southampton from 1988-97 before moving to the former School of Management at Southampton, first as a Lecturer and later a Senior Lecturer in Management Science. In 2007 Brailsford was appointed as a Professor in Management Science within Southampton Business School.

Her major research interest is health care modelling aimed at improving service delivery or evaluating screening programmes and treatments. This has encompassed work in a broad range of clinical application areas including diabetes, cancer, mental health and HIV/AIDS, emergency care and end-of-life care. Her interests span simulation methodologies..,[1] discrete event simulation,[2] system dynamics,[3][4] disease and vaccination modelling,[5] and the modelling of human behaviour in healthcare systems.[6] More latterly, Brailsford’s interests have focused on understanding why modelling approaches do not have as much influence in health care services as they have in other industries and the challenges of conducting impactful operational research in health[7][8]

Within the University of Southampton, Brailsford is Associate Dean for Research & Enterprise in the Faculty of Social Sciences[9] and was previously Associate Dean for Research in the former Faculty of Business & Law from 2010-13. She has also served as Head of the Management Science Department and has twice acted as Director of Southampton’s Centre for Operational Research, Management Science & Information Systems CORMSIS).

Brailsford has supervised 19 PhDs to completion, many of whom now hold academic positions all over the world, and she has also been a committee member for three PhDs in the Netherlands and Belgium. She has been an external examiner for more than 30 PhDs in over 20 different institutions, including universities in Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Canada and Australia.

She has been an invited plenary or keynote speaker at numerous international conferences and workshops, including most recently:

  • Interdisciplinarity of Health and Healthcare 2019, Lodz, Poland (June 2019)[10]
  • 30th European Conference on Operational Research, Dublin, Ireland (June 2019)[11]
  • 39th Operations Research / Industrial Engineering National Congress, YAEM 2019, Ankara, Turkey (June 2019)[12]
  • Optimization Days, Montreal, Canada[13] (May 2019)
  • The Operational Research Society's Simulation Workshop (SW18), Stratford-upon-Avon, UK (March 2018)
  • CIIO, Medellin, Colombia[14] (August 2017)
  • International Symposium on Modeling and Simulation of Complex Management Systems, Shenzhen, China (May 2016)

She was one of only three UK researchers to contribute to a special invited track on the history of simulation at the 50th US Winter Simulation Conference, held in Las Vegas in December 2017.  Her paper was entitled ‘Five Decades of Healthcare Simulation’.

Recognition

Brailsford has won the Operational Research Society's Goodeve Medal (awarded for the best paper in the Journal of the Operational Research Society each year) a record-breaking[15] three times (in 2004, 2006 and 2015).[16] In 2016, she was also awarded the Companion of Operational Research[17] by the Operational Research Society.

Brailsford served as a Council member of I-Sim, the INFORMS Simulation Society from 2016-17. From 2010-19 she was Chair of the EURO Working Group on OR Applied to Health Services (ORAHS)[18] and between 2012 and 2015 she was Vice President 1 of EURO (the Association of European OR Societies)[19]

Within the UK, Brailsford has been active in the Operational Research Society, serving as Vice-President during the period 2006-08 and as a member of several of the Society’s committees. She co-founded, and for a number of years was chair of, two of the Society’s Special Interest Groups: SD+ (originally aimed to promote the wider use of System Dynamics, but now subsumed into the Simulation SIG) and the Behavioural OR SIG. Together with Paul Harper, she chaired the Society’s 50th Anniversary Conference OR50 in York in 2008. She was a founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Health Systems (2011–19). From 2014 -17 she served as Chair of the UK Committee of Professors in Operational Research (COPIOR). She was also a member of the Policy Council of the UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society from 2014–16 and is a founding member of MASHnet, the UK Network for Modelling & Simulation in Healthcare.

Personal life

In 2000 Brailsford married Chris Potts, professor of Operational Research at the University of Southampton. She has three children from her previous marriage.

References
  1. Brailsford, Sally C.; Eldabi, Tillal; Kunc, Martin; Mustafee, Navonil; Osorio, Andres F. (2019). "Hybrid simulation modelling in operational research: A state-of-the-art review". European Journal of Operational Research. 278 (3): 721–737. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2018.10.025. ISSN 0377-2217.
  2. Brailsford, Sally (2014). "Discrete-event simulation is alive and kicking!". Journal of Simulation. 8 (1): 1–8. doi:10.1057/jos.2013.13. ISSN 1747-7778. S2CID 18380277.
  3. Walsh, Bronagh; Lattimer, Valerie; Wintrup, Julie; Brailsford, Sally (2015). "Professional perspectives on systemic barriers to admission avoidance: learning from a system dynamics study of older people's admission pathways" (PDF). International Journal of Older People Nursing. 10 (2): 105–114. doi:10.1111/opn.12056. ISSN 1748-3743. PMID 24849205.
  4. Viana, J.; Brailsford, S.C.; Harindra, V.; Harper, P.R. (2014). "Combining discrete-event simulation and system dynamics in a healthcare setting: A composite model for Chlamydia infection". European Journal of Operational Research. 237 (1): 196–206. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2014.02.052.
  5. Knerer, Gerhart; Currie, Christine S. M.; Brailsford, Sally C. (2015). "Impact of combined vector-control and vaccination strategies on transmission dynamics of dengue fever: a model-based analysis". Health Care Management Science. 18 (2): 205–217. doi:10.1007/s10729-013-9263-x. ISSN 1572-9389. PMID 24370922. S2CID 9711557.
  6. Brailsford, S.C.; Harper, P.R.; Sykes, J. (2012). "Incorporating human behaviour in simulation models of screening for breast cancer". European Journal of Operational Research. 219 (3): 491–507. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2011.10.041.
  7. Brailsford, S C; Bolt, T B; Bucci, G; Chaussalet, T M; Connell, N A; Harper, P R; Klein, J H; Pitt, M; Taylor, M (2013). "Overcoming the barriers: a qualitative study of simulation adoption in the NHS". Journal of the Operational Research Society. 64 (2): 157–168. doi:10.1057/jors.2011.130. ISSN 0160-5682. S2CID 33604468.
  8. Brailsford, Sally; Vissers, Jan (2011). "OR in healthcare: A European perspective". European Journal of Operational Research. 212 (2): 223–234. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2010.10.026. ISSN 0377-2217.
  9. "Faculty of Social Sciences | University of Southampton". www.southampton.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-11-10.
  10. "Programme". www.kbo.uni.lodz.pl. Retrieved 2019-11-10.
  11. "Tutorial Speakers | EURO-K Conference Dublin 2019". euro-k. Retrieved 2019-11-10.
  12. "39. Yöneylem Araştırması / Endüstri Mühendisliği Ulusal Kongresi |". www.yaem2019.org. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  13. "CIRRELT : JOPT2019 : Home". symposia.cirrelt.ca. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  14. "CIIO 2017 | Inicio". ingenieria.udea.edu.co. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  15. "sally-brailsford-receives-record-third-goodeve-medal | CORMSIS Centre for Operational Research, Management Sciences and Information Systems | University of Southampton". www.southampton.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
  16. "Previous Awards - The OR Society". www.theorsociety.com. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
  17. "Previous Awards - The OR Society". www.theorsociety.com. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
  18. "ORAHS :: Operational Research Applied to Health Services". orahs.di.unito.it. Retrieved 2019-11-10.
  19. "EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies - Previous members of the Executive Committee". www.euro-online.org. Retrieved 2019-11-09.
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