General Register Office (England & Wales), World Health Organization
Eileen Minnie Brooke (1905 – 1989) was a British statistician and health policy professional.
Education
Eileen Minnie Brooke attended East London College, earning a B.Sc. in mathematics in 1926, and an M.Sc. in mathematics in 1929. She completed doctoral studies in 1952.[1]
In Great Britain, 1940s–1960s
In the 1940s, Brooke was based at the E. M. S. Statistical Branch in Norcross, and studied wartime health issues, including battle exhaustion,[2] burns,[3] and gastric ulcers.[4] She was elected a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society in 1943.[5]
Brooke was co-author of The survey of sickness, 1943 to 1952 (1957, with W. P. D. Logan),[10] and author of A cohort study of patients first admitted to mental hospitals in 1954 and 1955 (1963)[11][12] and A census of patients in psychiatric beds, 1963 (1967).[13]
International work, 1960s–1970s
Brooke spoke at a mental health conference in Pennsylvania in 1964.[14] She was chief of the Department of Medical Information and Statistics at the University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne.[15][16] She was a collaborating investigator on the World Health Organization's International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia in the late 1960s.[17][18] In 1977 she spoke at an WHO workshop on "the medico-social risks of alcohol consumption" in Luxembourg.[16]
Brooke wrote and edited policy reports for the World Health Organization and other international bodies, including The methodology of psychiatric out-patient data collection (1973),[19]The current and future use of registers in health information systems (1974),[20][21]Suicide and attempted suicide (1974),[22] and Activities in the field of drug dependence (European region) (1975).[23]
Death
Brooke died in 1989. A colleague wrote in an obituary that "Miss Brooke was precious to WHO's programmes because she was a statistician who liked to assemble data, enjoyed handling them and had the ability to present them without ever losing sight of the broader context in which these data were gathered."[24] Her papers are held in the Mile End Library, Queen Mary University of London.[1]
Selected journal publications
"Battle Exhaustion: Review of 500 Cases from Western Europe" British Medical Journal, 1946[2]
"Trends in the mental hospital population and their effect on future planning", The Lancet, 1961. (with G. C. Tooth)[25]
"More and More Barbiturates" Medicine, Science and the Law, 1964. (with M. M. Glatt)[26]
"Problems in determining the needs for mental health facilities in Britain" Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 1964. (with John H. Mabry)[27]
"Some Aspects of Suicide in Psychiatric Patients in Southend" The British Journal of Psychiatry, 1968. (with A. A. Robin and Dorothy L. Freeman-Browne)
"Judgments of trained observers on adverse drug reactions" Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 1979. (with Sylviane Blanc, Philippe Leuenberg, and Jean-Louis Schelling)[28]
"Drug-addiction in the canton of Vaud, 1974–8" Sozial- und Präventivmedizin, 1980. (with A. Delachaux and E. Haller)
^Brooke, Eileen M. (1945). "Burns And Their Treatment Among E.M.S. Hospital In-Patients". The British Medical Journal. 1 (4390): 259–260. ISSN0007-1447. JSTOR20347818.
^Brooke, Eileen M; World Health Organization; Regional Office for Europe (1973). The methodology of psychiatric out-patient data collection; report on a pilot study undertaken for the Regional Office for Europe of the World Health Organization. Copenhagen: Distributed by the Regional Office for Europe, World Health Organization. OCLC8360119.
^Brooke, Eileen M. (1974). The current and future use of registers in health information systems. Geneva: World Health Organization. ISBN92-4-170008-4. OCLC1074055.
^Brooke, Eileen M; Council of Europe; Committee of Ministers (1975). Activities in the field of drug dependence (European region). Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Public Health Division, Ad hoc Committee on Drug Dependence. OCLC2128439.
^Brooke, Eileen M.; Mabry, John H. (1 September 1964). "Problems in determining the needs for mental health facilities in britain". Journal of Chronic Diseases. 17 (9): 773–778. doi:10.1016/0021-9681(64)90006-2. ISSN0021-9681. PMID5879150.
^Blanc, Sylviane; Leuenberger, Philippe; Berger, Jean-Pierre; Brooke, Eileen M.; Schelling, Jean-Louis (1979). "Judgments of trained observers on adverse drug reactions". Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. 25 (5part1): 493–498. doi:10.1002/cpt1979255part1493. ISSN1532-6535. PMID436353. S2CID39887959.