VIVALDI SOCIAL CARE DATABASE

• Research type

  Research Database

• IRAS ID

  330194

• Research summary

  VIVALDI SOCIAL CARE

• REC name

  South West - Frenchay Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  23/SW/0105

• Date of REC Opinion

  5 Dec 2023

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion

• Data collection arrangements

  The VIVALDI Social Care Database will store data on infections, hospital attendances, vaccinations, antibiotic prescriptions, and deaths in older adults who live in care homes. This information will be anonymized (names and dates of birth removed) so it will not be possible to link data back to individuals.

  There is no national database of people who live in care homes, so the first step is to create one. We will extract NHS numbers for residents from the companies that provide electronic records to care homes and transfer these lists to NHS England. NHS England will use the NHS number to create a new, unique number for each record, and will then delete the NHS number. Next, they will transfer the dataset to a secure environment called NHS Foundry, which has been designed to store national health and social care datasets. The VIVALDI Research Database will be created by linking the list of care home residents to other NHS records that are held in Foundry using each records unique number. The dataset will be updated regularly, and an anonymized copy of it will be transferred to the UCL Data Safe Haven, a secure datastore, for analysis by researchers.

• Research programme

  Every year care home residents experience infections and outbreaks, which reduce their physical and mental health and well-being and cause avoidable hospital admissions and deaths. Many of these infections could be avoided with better evidence on ‘what works in care homes’ and systems to keep track of and therefore stop infection. Before COVID-19 there was no national system to monitor infections in care homes. We set up the first large scale study of infection in care homes during the pandemic (VIVALDI), which helped to protect residents and reduce the spread of infection. We want to build on learning from the pandemic to reduce other, major causes of infections in care homes, like flu. We aim to establish a network of ‘research active’ care homes and to create a Research Database by collecting and linking data on residents in these homes. The database will include information on infections, vaccinations, hospitalisations, and deaths from approximately 15,000-30,000 care home residents in England in 500-1500 care homes. It will be one of the largest research databases of care home residents in the world and will help us to identify new ways to protect residents from common infections, improving their health and wellbeing.

• Research database title

  VIVALDI SOCIAL CARE

• Establishment organisation

  University College London

• Establishment organisation address

  Institute of Health Informatics

  University College London

  222 Euston Rd

  NW1 2DA