The CHI team are involved in numerous care and health informatics projects which are part of ARC NWC – a selection of these are summarised below. The team page has links to everyone’s main work profiles, which will have details of other projects outside of the ARC.

SYSTEM P

System P takes a whole system approach to addressing multiagency, multisector challenges that negatively impact population health and will deliver transformational change in service provision though collaborative working across Cheshire & Merseyside. Data and analytics are key to its success. Funded by the Cheshire & Merseyside Integrated Care System, its work is initially concentrating on two segments of the population, namely ‘complex lives’ and ‘frailty and dementia’.

The Care and Health Informatics team from ARC NWC are working with System P, by taking part in hackathons and in providing analytical and data support. More information on System P can be found below.

Place-Based Longitudinal Data Resource (PLDR)

The Place-Based Longitudinal Data Resource (PLDR) brings together datasets that track changes in the determinants of health and health outcomes, in places over time. These are used by researchers, local government, the NHS and the third sector to understand what works to improve public and health, what doesn’t and what can cause harm.

The PLDR uses local and national datasets (e.g Hospital admissions data, budgetary data, prescribing data) to calculate indicators for places (neighbourhoods, local government areas, regions and countries) that are consistent over time. It also includes data from the North West Coast Household Panel Survey that has been commissioned by the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Health Research and Care, North West Coast (CLAHRC NWC). This survey was carried out in 2015 and 2018 in selected neighbourhoods in the North West.

The PLDR is designed to provide data that supports analysis of the health effects of area-based determinants and interventions. In particular, where new policies or interventions have been implemented in a particular area, a rapid natural experiment can be set up matching intervention areas to non-intervention areas selected from across England. For example, these approaches have been used to evaluate a community based cardiovascular service, a housing improvement intervention, a new GP quality improvement scheme and the CLAHRC NWC Neighbourhood Resilience Programme.

Find out more about the PLDR and explore the data here

Health Data Research UK ACMI

This project will develop the Anticholinergic Medication Index (ACMI) tool to calculate AC medication burden for older people in a summary score, stratified by frailty. The tool will be developed using prognostic modelling techniques and tested using anonymised routine data from the Connected Bradford dataset of over 180,000 people aged 65 years and older to see how well the score predicts being admitted to hospital with confusion or a fall. This score will run in a computer-based system designed with pharmacists and doctors to help them review patients’ medicines and reduce harm from ACs. The ACMI will be developed into a software tool with additional decision support resources and piloted in general practices in Bradford, before being offered for broader national use. The overall aim is to improve quality of life and clinical outcomes, and save NHS and social care costs.

Find out more about ACMI here

Civic Data Cooperative (CDC)

Continuing the Liverpool City Region’s tradition as a pioneer in public health, its Combined Authority has funded a Civic Data Co-operative (CDC), which will revolutionise how data is used to deliver better care for residents and create new health technology jobs in the region.

By providing better insights into care needs and enhancing data security across the many NHS and local government organisations that provide care, this will foster innovations such as technologies to help people with complex health conditions live better at home, or to help clinicians react quicker to prevent diseases getting worse.

The CDC works on various projects that operate with data related to citizens and believes in a transparent, open approach following best practices, translating lived experience into insight, delivering innovation with impact and using health data ethically and inclusively.

Find out more about the CDC here

Groundswell: Community & Data Led Systems Transformation of Urban Green & Blue Spaces for Population Health

A new partnership consisting of researchers, clinicians, practitioners and policymakers will work with local citizens – who have the most to benefit from better access to, and use of, quality spaces. Working collaboratively to identify poor quality and underused spaces through citizen-led approaches, we will develop and/or modify outdoor spaces so that they are high quality and fit for purpose. We will also work to identify ways in which we can promote such spaces for everyone, ensuring that no community is excluded from benefit. The important aspect is that local communities are fully involved in decisions about what they want, and what they will use, thus becoming central to the decision-making process. They will also be involved in the evaluation of these actions, enabling them to directly see how the process has benefited their communities.

An important part of putting actions and solutions in place is understanding if they work (or not). Data plays an important part in measuring success, particularly if the same data can be collected consistently across the different actions. We will establish a way of bringing multiple sources of data together so we can effectively determine what works across multiple projects and settings.

You can find out more about GroundsWell here.

Children Growing Up in Liverpool (C-GULL)

C-GULL is an exciting programme of research focused on improving the health and wellbeing of children and their families within the Liverpool City Region. It is a new longitudinal birth cohort nested within a civic data linkage programme and aims to reduce health inequalities by collecting data from 10,000 families from early pregnancy. By tracing the lives of these people, we will understand more about what influences the health and wellbeing of children and their families living in the region – providing valuable insights into how we can improve health outcomes for children.

Researching child health and development from pregnancy is a powerful way of understanding the many things that can shape a child’s life. We need to understand more about how each part of a child’s life comes together to affect their health and wellbeing. For example, family, genes, the environment in which they live and the services they are able to access and use.

The C-GULL Study launched in Autumn 2022 bringing together citizens, researchers and clinicians from across the Liverpool City Region and wider afield to make it one of the largest family studies in the UK.

Find out more about C-GULL here