What data is in IORD?

IORD is a big collection of computer records from people going to the main hospitals or GPs in Oxfordshire, which is about 1% of all the people in England. It has information from two places.

• The Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Clinical Data Warehouse. This is an NHS database which contains information on:
  • Whether people stayed in hospital and what happened, for example,
    • Did they have surgery or any other procedures in the hospital
    • Which parts of the hospital they stayed in
    • The kind of doctor who took care of them and what the doctor said was wrong
    • Things like their temperature and blood pressure
    • Any medicines they were given, including antibiotics
  • Visits to outpatient clinics and A&E
  • Test results from blood tests and other samples (like pus from a wound). This includes tests that GPs ask for
  • Which GP practice people go to, and which part of Oxfordshire they live in (the first part of their postcode, before the space)
  • Some basic information about people, like their sex, ethnicity and the month and year they were born. But it doesn’t have exact dates people were born.
  • If someone passed away, when this happened
• Data from really in-depth studies about tiny things called microbes or germs that can make people sick. Researchers at the Oxford National Institutes of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre study these microbes to figure out which ones cause different infections and how they’re connected to other microbes we’ve found in Oxfordshire.

IORD has information about a large number of people, more than a million, and it covers a really long time, over 25 years. Because there are so many people and so much time involved, it’s not possible to ask each person individually if it’s okay to use their data for medical research. But the people who make the rules about using this kind of data have given permission for this; this is called ethical approval. IORD has ethical approval from two different groups – an NHS Research Ethics Committee and the Confidentiality Advisory Group. This second group deals specifically with research where it is not possible to ask everyone individually whether it is okay to use their data.

We need information about people who have passed away, especially when we’re studying really serious infections, like sepsis. Also, many infections can spread from one person to another, like COVID-19. So, it’s very important to include as many people as we can when we’re studying how we catch infections. Otherwise we might miss links in the chain of infections.

You can read more about some of the different kinds of data in IORD.