POS-2026-3010 : A profile of migrants’ health using OpenSAFELY

Background
About 10 million people in the UK—17% of the population—were born outside the country. Some migrant groups face poorer health and struggle to access healthcare, but we still know too little about their specific health outcomes, especially around chronic and mental health conditions.

GP electronic health records (EHRs) contain valuable health data and are useful for research. OpenSAFELY is a secure system that allows analysis of the health records of nearly 58 million people in England. To study migrant health, researchers need to first determine if someone is a migrant in the data—but migration status isn’t routinely recorded. Sometimes it is included through clinical codes, like “Born in Algeria.”

Research aims
The proposed project aims to:
Create and test reliable migrant groups using GP data.
Study how common chronic and mental health conditions are among migrants.
Estimate hospital use and deaths among migrants, including avoidable deaths.

The goal is to improve understanding of migrant health in order to help shape more inclusive health services and policies.

How the study will be conducted
We will work with GPs to identify codes that suggest a person is a migrant. We will then use these codes to group people in the OpenSAFELY system and study their age, sex, ethnicity, and other characteristics. These groups will be compared with national immigration data.

We will then analyse how many migrants have conditions like heart disease, asthma, diabetes, depression, and PTSD. The study will also look at hospital admissions and deaths, focusing on those that could potentially have been prevented with better care. We will compare the rates in migrants with rates in the general population and also to rates in people who identify as White British. This will provide the foundation for identifying potential areas of health inequalities for migrants.

Involvement and safeguards
The project is supported by a steering committee that includes experts from the NHS, universities, migrant health charities, and the Department of Health and Social Care. Before the project began, interviews were held with eight GPs who care for migrant patients and ten individuals with lived experience of migration. Further interviews with six of the original participants will take place and three other time points during the project to help guide the methods and ensure the results are interpreted and communicated responsibly.