Virtual wards provide care at home with remote monitoring for people who do not need admission to hospital, but require hospital-led care. NHS England (NHSE) has requested an extension of a virtual ward model of care, with a national ambition of developing 40-50 virtual ward ‘beds’ per 100,000 population.

​The Surgical Assessment Unit Virtual Ward manages patients who are clinically suitable for home while waiting for investigation or treatment for an acute surgical condition.

To support a better evidence base for surgical virtual wards, PIONEER has curated a highly granular dataset of 1,655,756 spells eligible for Virtual Surgical Assessment Unit (VSAU), with a proportion of patients being admitted to the VSAU, and a proportion remaining in tradition care pathways. The data includes demography, co-morbidities, presenting symptoms, serial physiology, diagnoses, investigations, treatments (including procedures) and outcomes. The current dataset includes admissions from 2018 to 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”.

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 provide the dataset in OMOP and other common data models and 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.