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Understanding the breathlessness clinical pathway and identifying variations and predictors of clinical outcomes

Safe People

Organisation name

University of Edinburgh

Applicant name(s)

Dr Atul Anand

Safe Projects

Project ID

DL-2021-025

Lay summary

More than one third of patients seeking urgent hospital treatment in Scotland do so because of breathing difficulties. Research tends to focus on diseases (e.g. asthma) rather than symptoms like breathlessness. The patient journey across different parts of the health service has not been well studied. In this project, we will study patients that attended the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’s Emergency Department with breathlessness and investigate what happened next. We will look to better understand the patterns of referrals, tests, appointments, and other outcomes that follow a hospital attendance. We will try to understand the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on this group of patients. Our analysis will use techniques that help predict how likely it is that a patient will follow a particular treatment pathway. The purpose of this work is to guide improvements in these pathways in the future, for example by reducing unnecessary delays to treatment or testing.

Request category type

Public Health Research

Latest approval date

27/05/2022

Safe Data

Dataset(s) name
Data sensitivity level

De-Personalised

Safe Setting

Access type

TRE