Project #94:
PostOpCovid

People need to attend hospital for investigations and procedures to diagnose and treat illnesses. There is evidence that fear of COVID-19 kept them away in the pandemic, and that hospital acquired COVID-19 occurred and adversely affected some patients who attended. Patients need to know that they can come to hospital safely, and patients and doctors need to understand the risk and impact of acquiring COVID-19 and which factors make its post-operative outcomes worse. Then safe policies can be implemented and monitored, and patients better informed of the risks and benefits of attending hospital for routine care.

Within our hospital we use routinely collected data to measure these risks and monitor impacts of policy changes. However, data in a single trust cannot provide the power to fully characterise the risks pertaining to different patients and procedures. This proposal using national health data will provide more precise, generalisable, repeatable risk estimates appropriately adjusted for differences between patients and procedures. We will use the OpenSAFELY Trusted Research Environment to provide hospital data on procedures and investigations, readmissions, and critical care admissions from secondary care data, deaths, COVID-19 vaccination and testing data, and primary care diagnoses and prescriptions to incorporate pre-existing patient factors and the varying community levels of COVID-19 infections.

This work will provide reusable tools in real-world data for patients attending hospital for care; identifying high risk patients that might need pathway improvements and low risk patients and procedures