The RCGP Research & Surveillance Centre (formerly the
Birmingham Research Unit)
The RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre
(RCGP RSC) was established in 1957 as the Records and Statistical
Unit and since then has been particularly concerned with the
surveillance of diseases as they present to general practitioners.
Today, the Centre is primarily a surveillance unit
which collects and monitors data from a network of
approximately 100 participating GPs well distributed throughout
England & Wales. The Centre is best known for its
twice weekly reporting and surveillance of influenza-like
illness and other respiratory diseases and for its involvement in
national morbidity surveys which it has conducted in cooperation
with the Office of National Statistics. The Centre's weekly
Communicable and Respiratory Disease Report for England & Wales
together with it's supplementary reports can be found on the
Weekly Data
page.
Participating practices provide a tabular
summary of the number of patients seen each week categorised by
gender, age group and disease or disease group. The disease-based
information is classified according to the Read code classification
system and data on new episodes of illness are collected separately
from data on ongoing or follow-up consultations. The detailed age
specific practice registered population is also collected with each
set of data transferred. The data are processed to provide
incidence and prevalence rates of diseases, some of which are
reported on this website on the Annual Reports and Annual
Prevalence pages.
The Centre is now in the final
stages of upgrading its computer data base and IT equipment.
The new system will provide exciting new opportunities and expand
the research potential of the Centre. It will allow staff to
extract a greater part of the patient record whilst still retaining
full anonymity which will in turn allow greater analysis of links
between, for example, influenza vaccination and subsequent cases of
influenza.
During 2008 the new post of ‘Practice Liaison
Officer’ was created as part of the Vaccine Effectiveness Study, an
EU funded study being carried out in collaboration with the Health
Protection Agency and EpiConcept, Paris. This has provided the team
at the Centre with valuable feedback from the participating
practices, strengthening working relationships with GPs and
ensuring quality of data input.
The RCGP Research & Surveillance
Centre maintains a continuing programme of research in a wide
and varied number of fields and in 2008 had seven research
papers published including ‘Acute respiratory infections and
winter pressures on hospital admissions in England & Wales
1990-2005’ which explored the links between hospital pressures and
disease reported in the community. Recent research papers can be
found on the Research Papers page.
Studies planned for 2009 include the ‘APRES’
study in collaboration with the NIVEL Institute in Holland which
will study the prevalence of antibiotic resistant organisms in the
noses of a random sample of healthy people.
The work of the Centre is funded by the Health Protection Agency.