Four projects tackling some of London’s key health challenges have been awarded a total of £1 million to demonstrate how the use of data at scale can improve health outcomes, supporting delivery of the London Health Data Strategy.
The Clinical Effectiveness Group at Queen Mary University of London leads one of the four successful projects: a primary care quality improvement system designed to address falling rates of routine childhood immunisations.
Vaccines protect children from serious infections. However not all London children are fully or equally protected: those living in poorer areas or from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to miss, or be late in, getting vaccinated.
CHIME - CHildhood immunisation system to IMprove timeliness and Equity – will use data to enable a quality improvement system that can be scaled across London to improve vaccine uptake and reduce delays and inequalities. The project will be delivered as a partnership between general practice (GP) teams, health data teams, patients and immunisation leads across three London regions – North East, South East and North West London - covering 443,000 (77%) of the capital’s preschool children.
CHIME will provide frontline GP teams with in-practice digital tools to help identify all pre-school children registered with their practice whose vaccinations are due or overdue, review each child’s vaccination record at a glance, and access information to support conversations with parents. Shared dashboards and maps will monitor regional performance, providing near real-time intelligence for public health teams and healthcare commissioners.
Carol Dezateux, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Health Data Science at Queen Mary University of London, said: “London faces an urgent threat from preventable diseases like measles, with many children unprotected or receiving vaccinations late. This has worsened during the pandemic. The London Data Strategy is a fantastic opportunity to expand our long-standing work using data in North East London in partnership with other London regions. I am immensely excited to lead this project, which will ensure that children from all backgrounds are equally protected without delay and no child is left behind.”
The project will raise public awareness of the importance of timely childhood vaccinations by developing and sharing materials in collaboration with parents, local organisations and primary care staff. As a Pathfinder Project, CHIME will also develop shared learning on approaches to health improvement using data and will be an exemplar for assuring data quality and curation at source.
The London Health Data Strategy presents a coordinated, partnership approach to safely join-up health and care data across the capital, and drive collaboration between existing initiatives to make London a world-leader in the use of data to improve health outcomes, provide insights and intelligence, and connect research and clinical care to create a genuinely learning health system.
The strategy was commissioned by NHS England (London Region) and London’s leading research universities, and convened by Health Data Research UK. Implementation of the London Health Data Strategy Programme follows extensive public engagement as part of a London-wide Citizens’ Summit, where participants mandated for health and care data to be consistently joined-up as part of a population dataset to support proactive care, planning and research. The public continues to be involved in every aspect of the programme, with Citizen Representatives appointed to the Stakeholder Board, and plans for further deliberative engagement with Londoners to shape ongoing policy and governance. This approach aligns with public expectations around continued involvement and oversight in the join-up and use of health and care data as a condition for building trust and confidence.
Download the London Health Data Strategy [PDF].
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