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Impact of COVID-19 on Antibiotic Prescribing in North West London
Safe People
Organisation name
Imperial College London
Organisation sector
Academic Institute
Applicant name(s)
Paul Aylin
Funders/ Sponsors
Alison Holmes
DEA accredited researcher?
Unknown
Sub-licence arrangements (if any)?
No
Safe Projects
Project ID
NIBDAPC_2022_0017
Lay summary
Antibiotics are medications used to treat bacterial infections, which are very common in England. If antibiotics were not provided when needed, infection might get worse and sometimes be vital. However, if using antibiotics when unnecessary, the pathogens will become resistant to the medication and make treating future infections impossible. Therefore we must carefully monitoring how antibiotics are used. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected how infections were managed and treated with antibiotics, for example, some hospitalised COVID-19 patients were treated with antibiotics despite such medication cannot cure COVID-19 which is a viral infection. On the other hand, increased work pressure on hospital laboratories might have delayed the confirmation of bacterial infections that required antibiotic treatment. In this project, we have been supported by the individual level de-identifided patient data collected from three hospitals from ICHT, to continue monitoring whether antibiotic prescribing was appropriate. We also aimed to assess the impact of multiple complex factors, such as different COVID-19 variant, hospital admission patient mix, changes in guidelines, might have influenced other infectious diseases other than COVID-19.
Public benefit statement
Tackling AMRis one of the nation’s highest public health priorities. Our work is in line with UK’s 20 year vision of AMR, and England’s national strategy for infectious diseases. Benefited from the unique setting of our research group (NIHR HPRU in HCAI and AMR), which is a close collaboration between Imperial College, UKHSA, and local NHS trusts, research outputs can be disseminated and translated to policy and patient management guidelines rapidly to enhance the quality of care. In addition, the highly granular patient level data in iCARE environment provides knowledge complementary to the data produced by UKHSA at national level (covered larger population but less detailed). This work will help identify any sub-optimal prescribing practices in secondary care, any newly emerged drug resistant infections, and any unintended conseuqnces associated with national prescribing guidelines and prescribing interventions.
Request category type
Public Health Research
Other approval committees
Project start date
01/12/2022
Latest approval date
21/09/2022
Safe Data
Dataset(s) name
ICHT COVID-19 Research Dataset
Data sensitivity level
De-Personalised
Common Law Duty of Confidentiality
Not applicable
National data opt-out applied?
Not applicable
Request frequency
One-off
Release/Access date
01/12/2022
Safe Setting
Access type
TRE
Safe Outputs
Link to research outputs