CVD-COVID-UK, co-ordinated by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Data Science Centre, is one of the NIHR-BHF Cardiovascular Partnership’s National Flagship Projects.

It aims to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and cardiovascular diseases through analyses of de-identified, pseudonymised, linked, nationally collated health datasets across the four nations of the UK.

The consortium has over 400 members across more than 50 institutions including data custodians, data scientists and clinicians, all of whom have signed up to an agreed set of principles with an inclusive, open and transparent ethos.

Approved researchers access data within secure trusted/secure research environments (TREs/SDEs) provided by NHS England (England), the National Safe Haven (Scotland), the SAIL Databank (Wales) and the Honest Broker Service (Northern Ireland).

Linkable datasets include those from primary and secondary care, COVID lab tests and vaccinations, deaths, critical care, prescribing/dispensing, cardiovascular and stroke audits, maternity services and mental health.

The centre has gained approval to broaden the scope of the programme to all COVID-related research (in NHS England’s SDE for England only). This is known as COVID-IMPACT and it will help to support research projects from the wider community, including for the National Core Studies.

A dashboard of datasets available in each nation’s TRE can be found here: https://bhfdatasciencecentre.org/areas/cvd-covid-uk-covid-impact/

Note:

• The demographic information/counts are approximate and rounded. Figures should not be used for anything other than a rough indication of size of the grouping.
• Counts for people between 5-24 years have been approximated into these bins based on the age bins in the COALESCE study. https://www.hdruk.ac.uk/projects/coalesce/
• All count of people above the age of 85 years are included in the age bin 85-90 years.