Main website: https://stapm.gitlab.io/
The aim of the STAPM research programme at the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield, UK, is to identify and evaluate approaches to reducing the harm from tobacco and alcohol, with the aim of improving commissioning in a public health policy context, i.e. providing knowledge to support benefits achieved by policymakers.
The two objectives of the STAPM research programme are:
- To evaluate the health and economic effects of past trends, policy changes or interventions that have affected alcohol consumption and/or tobacco smoking
- To appraise the health and economic outcomes of potential future trends, changes to alcohol and/or tobacco policy or new interventions
The STAPM platform is not linked to the tobacco or alcohol industry and is conducted without industry funding or influence.
The modelling was developed in R and R studio, with particular attention to utilising new developments in the software environment to organise, document, and version control code.
A set of internal STAPM R packages have been developed that contain code used for particular purposes, e.g. to estimate smoking state transition probabilities from cross-sectional survey data (see https://stapm.gitlab.io/software.html). Packaging up code into modular functions and packages makes the processes applied in modelling easier to document, adapt and reuse across projects.
The long term goal is to make the STAPM code open source. Some STAPM code is starting to become publicly available on this Github repository, but the majority is currently available only to the project team on Gitlab.
