Dr. Rachel Churchill Reader at Bristol UniversityDr Churchill is a Reader in Psychiatric Epidemiology as well as the Coordinating Editor of the Cochrane Common Mental Disorders Group (CCMDG) at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research interests include evaluating the effectiveness of a range of interventions, particularly psychological therapies, for people with mood disorders. She has been involved with the Cochrane Collaboration since 1994, and leads an international team of more than 20 senior clinical, non-clinical and methods editors, providing academic leadership for the area within the Cochrane Collaboration, and driving the group’s strategic direction. The CCMDG team supports more than 1100 Cochrane contributors across 48 countries, has published well over 150 reviews, and is actively supporting around 70 on-going reviews. The influence of CCMDG reviews is considerable; they are utilised by clinicians, underpin NICE guidelines and are widely cited internationally in clinical guidance, health policy and the scientific literature (CCMDG’s portfolio has a journal Impact Factor of 10.22). Dr Churchill’s work in evidence based mental health has attracted significant infrastructure and programme grant funding, and she has led or collaborated on more than 35 research projects, attracting grant funding to the combined value of over £10 million, demonstrating its value and importance.
Over the last 20 years, she has worked continuously at the interface between research and policy, including leading two UK Department of Health commissioned evidence syntheses on mental health legislation to inform the development of the 2007 Mental Health Act. Throughout her career, she has concentrated on developing novel methods for evidence synthesis and working with multiple organisations to ensure that evidence informs policy and practice. In 2006 she established Best Evidence Summaries of Topics in Mental Health (BEST in MH), a clinical question answering service based at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. She set-up a similar service in Bristol at the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership Trust which was nominated for the Health Services Journal Mental Health Innovations Awards in 2014. Before moving to Bristol, she worked in the US as a Clinical Evidence Specialist with the Center for Evidence-based Policy at Oregon Health and Science University in the US. Most recently, she has focused on developing overviews and multiple treatments meta-analyses to better summarise and improve the utility of evidence from reviews. For the last four years, she has been a member of the Cochrane Steering Group, the Board of Trustees of Cochrane. She is also a Director of Well Consulting Limited which supports a range of activities relating to evidence synthesis and evidence based decision-making in health policy and practice.
