A highly granular large dataset of 10,908,440 admissions, curated by PIONEER to look at matching DEFRA’s air pollution data to the patients registered address. The data includes demography, admission details, diagnostic codes (ICD-10 & SNOMED-CT), respiratory data, medications, presenting complaints all linked to DEFRA air quality. This dataset offers an exceptional resource for researchers seeking to understand the short- and long-term impacts of air quality on health outcomes. This dataset synergises DEFRA air pollution data with anonymised health records to offer an opportunity for multidisciplinary research in environmental health, epidemiology and beyond. The current dataset includes admissions from 01-01-2000 to 31-08-2023 but can be expanded to assess other timelines of interest.

Geography: The West Midlands (WM) has a population of 6 million & includes a diverse ethnic & socio-economic mix. UHB is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & > 120 ITU bed capacity. UHB runs a fully electronic healthcare record (EHR) (PICS; Birmingham Systems), a shared primary & secondary care record (Your Care Connected) & a patient portal “My Health”.

DEFRA

Air quality data has been extracted from sampling stations in the Birmingham area, hourly rates of volatile and non-volatile particulates, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. Each station covers a subset of the pollutants, so this may not necessarily be the full set. © Crown 2024 copyright Defra via uk-air.defra.gov.uk, licenced under the Open Government Licence (OGL).

Data set availability: Data access is available via the PIONEER Hub for projects which will benefit the public or patients. This can be by developing a new understanding of disease, by providing insights into how to improve care, or by developing new models, tools, treatments, or care processes. Data access can be provided to NHS, academic, commercial, policy and third sector organisations. Applications from SMEs are welcome. There is a single data access process, with public oversight provided by our public review committee, the Data Trust Committee. Contact pioneer@uhb.nhs.uk or visit www.pioneerdatahub.co.uk for more details.

Available supplementary data: Matched controls; ambulance and community data. Unstructured data (images). We can build synthetic data to meet bespoke requirements.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, model build, validation & refinement; A.I. support. Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) processes. Bespoke and “off the shelf” Trusted Research Environment (TRE) build and run. Consultancy with clinical, patient & end-user and purchaser access/ support. Support for regulatory requirements. Cohort discovery. Data-driven trials and “fast screen” services to assess population size.