RECAP (REmote Covid Assessment in Primary Care)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
RECAP (Remote Covid Assessment in Primary Care): a learning system approach to develop an early warning score for use by primary care practitioners
IRAS ID
283024
Contact name
Brendan Delaney
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
We want to develop a score for GPs to use when assessing how bad someone is with COVID, to use over the phone or by video. The most widely used 'early warning score' is NEWS2 but this wasn't designed for use in COVID and it's a hospital score. We will use features of COVID that are known to be markers of more serious disease.
After seeking preliminary advice from the chair of the Oxford REC, we’re doing desk research and undertaking an online Delphi survey with 70 GPs who regularly have consultations with COVID patients, to refine the selection and wording of items. This part was not considered to need REC approval as it’s developing the instrument we plan to test. That work is almost complete.
We now want to build these items into templates on the GP electronic record so the doctor can easily be prompted to ask particular questions and enter data. Then, we plan to use record analysis to work out which aspects of the RECAP score actually predicted severity, using three outcomes: admission to hospital, admission to ITU, and death. The analysis won't use identifiable patient data.
We hope we'll end up with a score which, along with clinical judgement, will help GPs distinguish patients who should be sent to hospital from those who can be safely managed in primary care.
Clearly, this is urgent and we think such a score could save lives by a) reducing the number pf people who are sent to hospital unnecessarily and b) ensuring that nobody who does need urgent hospital assessment misses out.
We will also conduct a qualitative study of GPs experiences using the RECAP score.
REC name
North West - Greater Manchester East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/NW/0266
Date of REC Opinion
27 May 2020
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion