Professor Neil O'Connell
Professor - Evidence-Based Healthcare

ENTRUST-PE : Enhancing Trust in Pain Evidence
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.

A mixed methods systematic review on the effects of arts interventions for at-risk and offending children and young people on behavioural, psychosocial, cognitive and offending outcomes
Funder: The Youth Endowment Foundation and the Campbell Collaboration
Duration: March 2022 - February 2023

Pain management in liminal spaces - ESRC STUDENTSHIP - DIARMUID DENNENY
Funder: Economic & Social Research Council
Duration: October 2021 - September 2028

Physical Activity and Dementia Evidence Review
Funder: Dementia UK
Duration: 2021 -

MEMOIR: A multi-national randomised factorial placebo-controlled trial with embedded mechanism evaluation of memantine and graded motor imagery for complex regional pain syndrome
Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council
Duration: -

MEMOIR-OZ A multi-national randomised factorial placebo-controlled trial with embedded mechanism evaluation of memantine and graded motor imagery for complex regional pain syndrome
Funder: MRFF the Australian Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Rare Cancers, Rare Diseases and Unmet Need
Duration: -

PhD studentship - Optimising Exercise Prescription for People living with Rheumatoid Arthritis
Funder: University of Oxford
Duration: October 2017 - September 2023

A Systematic Review of Lifestyle and Cancer
Funder: Macmillan Cancer Support
Duration: November 2015 - May 2016