NIHR ARC Wessex is supporting this research 

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to create an unprecedented demand for acute care services. Hospitals face the challenge of needing to rapidly restructure care pathways and resourcing priorities to maximise survival rates for critically ill patients. University Hospital Southampton (UHS) needs evidence-based tools to support clinical and resource planning decisions in response to the pandemic. Until recently, UHS had insufficient information regarding the demand, patient trajectories through pathways and the optimal resources (i.e. people and equipment) needed to maintain care levels within the constraints of care worker fatigue. As such, COVID-19-ED aims to provide rapid response insight to analytics questions provided by UHS. Each question will be evaluated to determine the most effective and efficient course of action considering criticality and feasibility in relation to available models, data and other resources. COVID-19-ED will be delivered by expertise from across the University (Medicine, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences FEPS, FSS) and commercial consultancies (Boston Consulting).

Principles

• We prioritise unmet information and insight needs from UHS, rather than analytics for our own curiosity

• We rigorously assess the value of outcomes to UHS to ensure we work on the urgent and important questions, whilst reducing interaction with UHS to a minimum level of guidance and knowledge communication. 

• We compromise to produce solutions that are rapid, good enough and can be incrementally improved rather than trying to deliver a perfect solution

• We freely share data, models and contextual knowledge with each other to continuously increase the team’s knowledge of the evolving health system

• We work within the constraints of Information Governance legislation and regulation

Who's involved (not exhaustive)