National COVID-19 health informatics projects

In April 2020 we, with colleagues in the Universities of Bristol, Bath and Exeter (representing ARC South West Peninsula), were successful in a £1.2 million bid to Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) to become a Better Care Partnership, and new site of HDR UK.

Joining the wider HDR UK family as the HDR UK Better Care South-West Partnership has also led to our involvement in national projects related to COVID-19, including:

collateral effects of the reorientation of primary care
COVID-19 risk modification by common medicines such as ACE inhibitors
the epidemiology of COVID-19 in care homes

We have played a leading role in the Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing COVID-19 National Core Study. This study, led by Nishi Chaturvedi at University College London and Jonathan Sterne at the University of Bristol, is built round the Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (LLC). LLC aims to enhance UK longitudinal population studies by linking them together and to routine health and social data, a model developed in Bristol by John Macleod and Andy Boyd with the ALSPAC cohort. In February 2021, NIHR awarded £10 million to a team led by Professor Chaturvedi including ARC West, to study long COVID using the LLC platform.