Research to identify measures of quality and safety of healthcare
Research type
Research Database
IRAS ID
173896
Contact name
Paul Aylin
Contact email
Research summary
Research to identify measures of quality and safety in healthcare
REC name
London - South East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/0824
Date of REC Opinion
23 Jun 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion
Data collection arrangements
We hold pseudonymised hospital administrative data for patients treated in the NHS in England since 1996 for research purposes. This includes information on hospital admissions, outpatient appointments and more recently on A&E attendance. Data are provided to us by the Health and Social Care Information Centre. Separately, we also hold a very limited identifiable data set which includes patients’ NHS Number and their Local Hospital Number. No other clinical data are held within this database, and it is kept completely separate from our research database. We hold these data for a maximum of three years to assist NHS hospitals to help them investigate potential issues around safety and quality of care. All our data are held on secure servers on the unit’s ‘Private Network’ which exists only within the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial Office and only pseudonymised versions will be stored on the DFU secure systems at South Kensington. Only a small defined number of authorised Imperial personnel can access our health data. We never pass any identifiable data to Dr Foster Intelligence.
Research programme
We use hospital administrative data to develop and validate measures of quality and safety for a range of patient groups and specialties. As an example, our research on weekend hospital death rates has helped to change services to provide better care at weekends. To compare units fairly, these measures often need to be adjusted for differences in patient characteristics such as age, and we will continue our work to take these into account. We also use the data to understand the reasons behind variations in performance, such as the relationship between surgeon experience, use of services, capacity and patient outcomes. We also use the data to alert NHS organisations of potential problems with quality and safety of care and to identify their own clinical records for further investigation. We supply a pseudonymised set of data to Dr Foster, who provide us with a research grant. Dr Foster are an independent provider of healthcare intelligence, and use the data in a range of information systems to help clinicians and managers to better understand their performance and safety in the context of others.
Research database title
Research to identify measures of quality and safety in healthcare
Establishment organisation
Dr Foster Unit, School of Public Health, Imperial College London
Establishment organisation address
3 Dorset Rise
London
EC4Y 8EN