Career
Karen Dunnell studied sciences at school because she wanted to go into medicine. However, a growing interest in politics and society led her to study sociology at Bedford College, London, from where she graduated in 1967. She began her career as a health care researcher with the Institute of Community Studies, where much of her work involved healthcare surveys, and, in 1972, she wrote a book, Medicine Takers, Prescribers and Hoarders with Ann Cartwright,. This established a measure of morbidity and the relationship between medicines acquired through the NHS and over-the-counter. Dunnell then joined the Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at St Thomas' Hospital Medical School, working on multi-disciplinary projects alongside doctors, social workers, statisticians and economists, including a major project that measured the cost of caring for people with severe disabilities in the community compared with the cost of caring for them in institutions.
She joined the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) in 1974, as a social survey officer in the Survey Division, where she stayed for 15 years, working on, among other things, two major surveys. One of these was the UK's contribution to the World Fertility Survey, published as a book, Family Formation, in 1976. This measured cohabitation for the first time and first asked the question, now a standard, "At what age did you first have sexual intercourse?". The other studied the work of community nurses, using an intensive survey combined with diary-keeping. She was promoted to Assistant Director, overseeing all health surveys in the OPCS. These included surveys on drinking and smoking and a major survey on disability that established what proportion of people in different age groups had different disabilities. She was responsible, in this post, for liaising with the Department of Health.
In 1990, she moved from working with health surveys in the OPCS to medical statistics. When OPCS merged with the Central Statistical Office to form the ONS in 1996, she became Director of Demography and Health Statistics, working on general practice statistics and inequalities in health, and established the Health Statistics Quarterly journal. In 1999, she moved to a central post responsible for launching National Statistics and dealing with the arrival of Len Cook, the first National Statistician, in 2000. She was promoted to Group Director in Social Statistics in 2000, managing health, demography, population, labour market and social reporting and was temporarily promoted to the Board of the ONS in 2001 in the run-up to the 2001 census. A major reorganisation, which divided the activities of ONS into 'sources' and 'analysis', followed and Dunnell was given the job of setting up the new "Sources" Directorate, bringing together household and business surveys, the infrastructure that supported them, the statistical modernisation programme and planning for the 2011 Census. She took up this post on the ONS Executive in 2002.
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