In 2018/19 we had over 550 studies running across a range of medical conditions, the highest of any NHS Trust in England. During 2018/19 over 19,500 people took part in research studies at Guy’s and St Thomas’.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ is part of King’s Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre (AHSC), a collaboration between King’s College London, and Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts.

At GSTT, we have several datasets that are available for research. These include Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), and NIHR Health Informatics Collaborative (HIC), which are detailed below.

HES is a database containing details of all admissions, A&E attendances and outpatient appointments at NHS hospitals in England. Data is collected during a patient’s time at hospital as part of the Commissioning Data Set (CDS). This is submitted to NHS Digital for processing and is returned to healthcare providers as the Secondary Uses Service (SUS). Each HES record contains a wide range of information about an individual patient admitted to an NHS hospital, including clinical information, patient demographics, administrative information and geographical information.

Benefits of HES datasets include:

  • monitoring trends and patterns in NHS hospital activity
  • assessing effective delivery of care
  • supporting local service planning
  • providing the basis for national indicators of clinical quality
  • revealing health trends over time
  • informing patient choice
  • determining fair access to health care
  • developing, monitoring and evaluating government policy
  • supporting NHS and parliamentary accountability

The HIC brings together all NHS trusts with NIHR Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs) to make NHS clinical data more readily available to NHS trusts and researchers. GSTT leads on the Renal Transplantation theme. This includes capturing clinical, laboratory and demographic data from all patients admitted for a kidney transplant between 1st of January 2005 and onwards, for patients who are over 16 from four BRCs.  All data is routinely collected as part of clinical care.

Benefits of HIC datasets are:

  • More effective use of electronic patient records
  • Improving the ability to draw comparisons from research and analysis
  • Making information held easier to find and use
  • Better opportunities to link with other public organisations, charities, academic organisations and industry to improve patient outcomes.

All data available for research is completely anonymised.

Kate Blake, Director of Research Strategy at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We are thrilled to be joining the UK Health Data Research Alliance. Guy’s and St Thomas’ is one of the leading Trusts for research in the country, and we look forward to being able to share best practice and solutions with colleagues at institutions across the UK. Being part of the Alliance is an important part of our ongoing work to ensure the highest possible standards are deployed when using our data.”

Work that GSTT has been involved in:
Project
Improving transparency in data use
Alliance members are committed to being transparent around their governance processes for accessing data and the approved uses of that data. As such, publishing a register of projects, studies and organisations that have used data under their custodianship is a vital demonstration of this. The work of the Alliance...