Safer Scoring

Theme 4 - Safer scoring is led by Dr Dave Brealey and Mr John Welch. 
 

This theme will focus on the challenge of ensuring that clinical risk scores are accurate, appropriately deployed, and support the care of all patients irrespective of personal characteristics.

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In our acute deterioration work, we will leverage the opportunity presented by our complete electronic health record and our Digital Patient Safety Laboratory, to improve the quality of early warning scores, by incorporating novel variables. These will include patient characteristics (e.g. ethnicity, age), other routinely available hospital data (e.g. laboratory results) and information about how the ward in which a patient is cared for is functioning (which we are calling "ward strain").

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In our surgical risk scoring work, we will again include novel variables (ethnicity and deprivation for example) to see if we can improve the accuracy with which scores predict patient outcomes. We will also look at prediction of less commonly used outcomes, which are more patient-centred (e.g. longer-term quality of life). Finally, we will try to improve the evidence for how high-risk patients should be looked after by first re-evaluating what constitutes a high-risk patient, and secondly, testing different interventions targeted specifically at them.