The Birmingham Research
Unit of the Royal College of General Practitioners 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. This work is funded by the
Department of Health and some
additional funding from the
Health Protection Agency. The Unit is
best known for its routine reporting of respiratory tract
infections on a twice-weekly basis and for its involvement in
national morbidity surveys which it has conducted in cooperation
with the Office of National Statistics.
Data are collected
routinely from a network of approximately 100 practices, well
distributed across England and Wales. The 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.