Gillian Hopkins Anderson

Gillian Anderson is interested in working with organisations to help solve problems and provide an outsiders perspective on problems they face. She has been involved in consulting and knowledge exchange projects within Department of Management Science since 2011. Her expertise lies in transferring and applying operational research methods to diverse research and consulting projects. With a background in process engineering, an honours degree in Business technology and excellent people skills she can get under the skin of an organisation to find out what is going on at grass roots level. She has worked with Scottish Power, Glasgow Life and Citizens’ Advice Bureau in collaboration with academic experts in the Department of Management Science.

Currently working in the public healthcare sector supported by Dr Robert van der Meer and Prof Alec Morton and funded by the Quality and Efficiency Support Team (QUEST) of the Scottish Government. The project will Increase the evidence base for orthopaedic process re-design to inform decision making at a health board and government level. This will be achieved by using discrete event simulation as a way of modelling natural and random variation within the processes. By allowing us to model variability at different parts of the process we gain a clear picture of how resources are utilised and budgets spent. Being able to explore ‘what if scenarios’ allows hospitals to identify efficiencies and tackle capacity and capability issues within their service.