IORD – Ongoing approved projects and project outputs

Clostridioides difficile or C diff is an important type of bacteria that can cause diarrhoea, particularly in people who have taken antibiotics or been in hospital. Most of the time, doctors can successfully treat C diff infections, but they can be serious and even life-threatening in some ... READ MORE

To safely use medical records in research via IORD and other similar research databases, the records are first “de-identified”. This means taking out names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, NHS numbers, etc, so that researchers cannot see information that could be used to identify who the ... READ MORE

Inflammation in the brain, known as encephalitis, is commonly caused by infections. Some people develop severe and debilitating complications following infectious encephalitis. These include death, seizures, and cognitive decline. Unfortunately, we cannot clearly identify those at risk of these ... READ MORE

People with blood cancers like leukaemia can easily get sick because their immune systems are not very strong. To treat these diseases, they might get special medicine called chemotherapy. Sometimes, doctors use chemotherapy to try and cure the disease, while in other cases, they use it to make the ... READ MORE

Enterococcus bacteria are a type of bacteria that live inside our intestines. Sometimes, they can make us sick with infections in different parts of our body, like the bladder, heart, stomach, and blood. In the UK, more and more people have been getting blood infections because of these Enterococcus ... READ MORE

Patients with acute respiratory illnesses commonly present in emergency departments and ambulatory assessment units. Diagnosing prevalent conditions such as respiratory infections or pulmonary embolism, which often cause these symptoms, can be challenging for doctors. Frequently, CT scans are ... READ MORE

Patients with blood conditions receiving treatment for cancer can be at increased risk of infection, especially when their white blood counts are low. Detecting infection early is important for making sure that it is treated effectively in these patients. Often this means that patients at high risk ... READ MORE

Hospital doctors currently make a decision on when patients are ready to discharge from hospital based on clinical experience, the information that they can read in the patient’s clinical record, and the availability of appropriate support in the community. This project aims to create a tool that ... READ MORE

Antibiotics are mainly old drugs that have been in use for many years. The doses of antibiotics we use to treat infections were mainly worked out using older methods in the 1960s-1980s. Often one fixed dose is used in adults with normal kidney function, and this dose is reduced in adults with poorer ... READ MORE

Neonatal sepsis is a major cause of death in infants and young children in low-income and middle-income countries. There is increasing concern that rising antimicrobial resistance is reducing the effectiveness of recommended antibiotic treatments. New studies are being set-up to test new approaches ... READ MORE

Increasingly detailed electronic health records are available and being used to try to work out how to improve management and outcomes in hospitals. However, these data are not always recorded accurately, and the impact of this on how they should best be used is unknown. We plan to look at ... READ MORE

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a sudden reduction in kidney function (commonly caused by infections and other illnesses) and occurs in about one-fifth of patients admitted to hospital. Compared to admissions not complicated by AKI, hospitalisation with AKI has been associated with longer stay and ... READ MORE

Electronic health records (EHR) are increasingly being used to conduct epidemiological research but there is little awareness or guidance regarding appropriate methods to check the validity of using such data when it spans long time periods.  Many things which contribute to how and what data is ... READ MORE

Fever is an important sign of infection and can be used to work out how to manage patients after they arrive at a hospital Emergency Department (ED) (called a “care pathway”). Often, patients with fever need specific tests or may even be admitted to hospital straightaway (for example if sepsis is ... READ MORE

A large number of companies making tests to diagnose infections are aiming to design tests which will be used by GPs in community settings. These rapid tests can give a single result to help doctors decide if an infection is present, or can perform a combination of different tests on a single ... READ MORE

The C-reactive protein (CRP) test is used by clinicians in various health care settings. CRP is an acute phase protein released into the blood during an infection or inflammation. There is an increase in the use of CRP test in primary care, accident and emergency departments and outpatient clinics. ... READ MORE

Re-admissions are instances where patients are admitted to hospital within a short period of time after having been sent home from a previous hospital admission. Re-admissions have been thought to reflect poor hospital care, with a potential negative impact on patient health. They are expensive for ... READ MORE

A delayed discharge occurs when a patient remains in hospital after having been declared medically fit to return home from a hospital admission. Patients may remain in hospital for reasons other than medical need due to for example delays in finding appropriate placements for community care, need to ... READ MORE

The numbers of children coming to A&E have steadily increased over the last 5 years, and are continuing to increase. This puts a large burden on NHS staff. However, the reasons behind this increase are not entirely clear. Parents may be bringing children who are less sick because they struggle ... READ MORE

Although relatively rare (under 5%), surgical site infections are the most common complication of planned operations (hospital admissions for what is termed “elective surgery”). Other complications (such as needing to be re-operated on, or even dying) are also rare, but may also be related to ... READ MORE

Urine cultures are the most commonly performed microbiology test at the Oxford University Hospitals but clinical impression is that many of these tests may be unnecessary. IORD provides an opportunity to see if we can answer clinical questions about the value of tests such as urine cultures for ... READ MORE

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Within a hospital, infectious disease can potentially pass from person-to-person through close contact. Without comprehensive data on actual contacts between different patients (contact ‘networks’), it is reasonable to assume that there is an increased chance of transmission of an infection between ... READ MORE

Summary of findings: We found that increases in severity of C. difficile diarrhoea, likely to due to the arrival of the hypervirulent 027 strain in the UK, could have been detected three years early using routine monitoring of neutrophil counts at diagnosis, compared with looking at patient ... READ MORE

See manuscript on The Lancet ... READ MORE