Professor
Sarah Wordsworth
Supernumerary Fellow in Population Health
Professor of Health Economics, Nuffield Department of Population Health
Academic background
I joined the Health Economics Research Centre in January 2003. In October 2006, I took up a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Institute for Health Research. This fellowship involved methodological and applied research on the economic evaluation of novel genomic technologies in the NHS. Prior to this appointment, I worked in the Health Economics Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen from 1995-2002, after completing an MSc in Health Economics in 1995 at the University of York.
As a Senior Fellow at St. Anne’s College I am a member of the college Governing Body, graduate advisor for DPhil and MSc students and part of the Centre for Personalised Medicine (St. Anne’s and Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics).
Teaching
I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate students, I am also Co-Director of the MSc in Precision Cancer Medicine (University of Oxford) and supervise DPhil students.
Research
I have developed a research programme within HERC on the economics of genetic and genomic technologies. Of particular interest are the economics of translating high-throughput sequencing technologies such as whole genome sequencing in rare diseases and cancer into health care systems.
My other research interests include antimicrobial resistance (AMR) where I explore the contribution that health economics can bring to this important health area and identify barriers to implementing interventions for reducing AMR. I also address methodological challenges in trial based economic evaluations in the areas of surgery for obesity, lung cancer surgery, cardiovascular disease and eye disease.
I undertake policy work and lead the Health Economics Genomics England Clinical Interpretation Partnership (GeCIP). for the UK’s 100,000 Genomes Project. This is the largest sequencing initiative in the world, and sequenced 100,000 entire genomes from around 70,000 National Health Service patients with rare diseases and cancer.
Selected publications
Koen B Pouwels, Stijn Vansteelandt, Rahul Batra, Jonathan Edgeworth, Sarah Wordsworth, Julie V Robotham, Improving the Uptake and SusTainability of Effective interventions to promote Prudent antibiotic Use and Primary care (STEP-UP) Team. Estimating the Effect of Healthcare-Associated Infections on Excess Length of Hospital Stay Using Inverse Probability–Weighted Survival Curves, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2020, ciaa136, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa136
, et al. Rationale and design of the POLEM trial: avelumab plus fluoropyrimidine-based chemotherapy as adjuvant treatment for stage III mismatch repair deficient or POLE exonuclease domain mutant colon cancer: a phase III randomised study,