Risks and impact of post operative COVID-19 infection
Research type
Research Study
Full title
What are the risks, subsequent impact, and predictors of COVID-19 infection in patients attending hospital for elective and emergency procedures and investigations?
IRAS ID
306579
Contact name
Colin J Crooks
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Nottingham
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
0000, NA
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 30 days
Research summary
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 doctors need to understand the risk and impact of acquiring COVID-19, and the patient and procedure factors predicting these outcomes. Only then can they implement safe policies and inform patients the risks and benefits of attending hospital for their routine care.
Within our hospital we use routinely collected data to measure these risks and monitor the impacts of policy changes. Data in a single trust however cannot provide the power to fully characterise the risks pertaining to different patients and procedures. This project using national health data would allow us to 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 that might allow relaxation of policies to facilitate the post COVID-19 NHS recovery.REC name
East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/EE/0278
Date of REC Opinion
15 Dec 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion