Chronic Respiratory Disease Study
Chronic respiratory disease (CRD) remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the UK, representing a large burden on the NHS. CRD has strong links with deprivation and health inequalities; this is particularly relevant in the Morecambe Bay Area, which contains some of the most deprived communities in the country.
The Morecambe Bay Respiratory Network (MBRN) is the emerging integrated care initiative in the local area which aims to improve the quality and efficiency of respiratory services to provide the best possible care for patients. The MBRN is based around a significantly upskilled primary care service, closely supported by secondary care expertise via monthly multi-disciplinary team meetings.
This project is at the interface of statistical methodology and applications in the health sciences. Through close contact with key clinical figures in respiratory disease, the results will provide answers to questions of local relevance to the NHS and will be used to guide the future development and implementation of the MBRN.
The research utilises a large body of medical data from the Morecambe Bay community data warehouse to achieve the following key aims:
- Understand patterns in health care service utilisation via spatio-temporal models
- Develop classification algorithms to understand the features of diagnostic quality for the four most prevalent CRDs (COPD, asthma, bronchiectasis, and ILD)
- Develop models to predict the effect of individual care pathways on symptom control and patient outcome following diagnosis