Project #190:
OpenSAFELY Feedback

During the COVID-19 pandemic we developed publicly accessible reports to understand how the pandemic was impacting important services across primary care organisations, and how quickly services were recovering. These reports provided valuable insights into key measures for clinical reviews, blood tests, and instances of high-risk prescribing.

Our key findings, which were published alongside the reports (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84673, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjmed-2022-000392), were: i) service delivery for key measures varied between GP practices before and during the pandemic, and ii) some measures of care were unaffected by the pandemic, and iii) some services have not returned to pre-pandemic levels as expected. In light of this, there is benefit in continuing to observe trends and variation in these measures to assess ongoing recovery of services from the COVID-19 pandemic. The continuation of these reports has been requested by the Primary Care Directorate of NHS England as part of the Primary Care Medicines and Analytics Unit.

This project aims to update these reports in line with the requirements of use of OpenSAFELY and to develop new key measures. It also aims to add additional demographic breakdowns (e.g. age, sex, clinical condition, region, deprivation) and measures, with a focus on showing differences in services or health outcomes between patients expected to have been impacted differently by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Understanding and sharing this data is important to provide NHS staff with timely information on opportunities to reduce variation in services and improve care processes.

We would also like to think about the future of these dashboards and how they might be used to benefit health care providers, and the public going forwards. During this project we will carry out some information gathering work. We will work with GPs and specialist doctors as well as members of the public to explore how we can improve the reports. Understanding variation between NHS organisations will inform targeted interventions to improve healthcare at local levels, help to identify healthcare inequalities, and facilitate the sharing of best practice strategies. Importantly, no data identifying individual practices (or any organisation smaller than region) will be shared using OpenSAFELY during this initial project.