Project #172:
Impact and inequalities of winter pressures in primary care: providing the evidence base for mitigation strategies

This project aims to provide new information on the drivers and determinants of use of NHS services during winter time, primarily resulting from infectious disease epidemics, and how this has been exacerbated by Covid-19.

The Covid-19 pandemic, has added intense pressure on NHS primary care services. Alongside COVID, there have been major surges of other respiratory diseases like Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and and influenza. New Covid-19 variants are a constant risk, and have previously exhibited increased severity and surged at different times of year, making forward planning difficult. There is an urgent need to prepare better for winter pressures in England in the era of Covid-19.

This project will examine winter pressures both before and after the pandemic, to understand the pressures that general practice faces due to respiratory viruses, and how this has changed and intensified in the era of endemic Covid-19. It will subsequently look at how these increased pressures affect patients and other health care services, develop tools that could be used to predict when practices are vulnerable to winter pressures, and model whether vaccination strategies might be able to mitigate the effects of winter pressures.