Improving Public Health
Find out all about how this science priority is improving people's lives - the strategy, projects underway, progress so far and the people involved
National Multimorbidity Resource
This project will work with researchers across the UK bringing together 6 different datasets which hold anonymised information on over 10 million people to explore multimorbidity in the UK at a...
Use of linked primary and secondary care data to identify the prevalence, characteristics a...
Overview Severe Asthma does not respond effectively to treatments available in Primary Care. New biologic drugs are available from specialist asthma centres for a subgroup of these patients....
Learning public health system for preventing asthma attacks
Asthma is a leading cause of acute hospital admission in children in Scotland. The team will use a national, dynamic longitudinal cohort to link healthcare and cross-sectoral data with patient...
Antenatal study finds low UVB exposure in pregnancy linked with higher risk of learning disabilities
Exposure to lower levels of sunlight in the winter has been linked to a higher risk of learning disabilities in children by a new Health Data Research UK study based on Scottish data
Predicting suicide risk using health data at scale
More than three-quarters of a million people globally take their own lives every year, to devastating personal, social and economic cost. Whilst past research has shown links between suicide and...
Linking health data to understand deaths of homeless patients
A five-year research project led by Dr Robert Aldridge at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics involved the analysis of medical records for nearly 4,000 homeless people, 600 of whom...
Connecting complex networks of datasets
The causes of poor health can be unexpected, long or short term, as well as local or global. We don’t always have the right data to know what effect a behaviour or intervention might have on public health.
In many cases the data we need already exists in GP surgeries and hospitals; the challenge is to create the infrastructure to link it all together.
To develop the capability to identify the things that cause ill-health in people, as well as the factors that result in improved health – no matter where they live or what their socioeconomic background – across the whole population of the UK.
To collect and link the right information, to track a greater variety of factors that affect people’s health, over their entire lifetime – the key to great public health research that improves prevention and early intervention to treat disease.
Our approach
We will enable data science to transform public health research Through linking to data beyond health care, for example, to other government sectors, organisations, and data on environments that influence health. The people that work in these areas may not usually regard the data they produce as having a major bearing on public health, but in fact decisions made in education, housing, technology, engineering, law, fiscal policy, environmental science, planning, history and behavioural sciences all impact our health.
By linking beyond the individual we will better evaluate risk factors, outcomes and potential for interventions that target related individuals or groups, for example, parents and children, households, neighbourhoods, and even whole countries. By enabling whole country comparisons, we will inform national policy development for the UK, improving health of all.
Publications and outputs
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BHF Data Science Centre
Improving the cardiovascular health of the nation using the power of large-scale data and advanced analytics across the UK.