The Born in Bradford project – a large study that will track the progress of more than 10,000 babies from pregnancy to adulthood – is to use data recorded on TPP SystmOne GP systems.
Born in Bradford is thought to be the world’s biggest study of children’s health ever to be undertaken. Parents-to-be are invited to participate in the project from conception right through to adulthood.
Progress of the babies is monitored by the Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, using a range of IT systems to monitor the progress of participants from the city.
In February, the trust deployed the Huntleigh Healthcare Eclipse maternity system, developed to document a complete obstetric track, from referral of a woman’s first pregnancy through to her most recent obstetric event.
The trust has now announced that it will use TPP’s SystmOne GP system to follow the children as they grow up and move around, recording contact in both primary and secondary care.
Professor John Wright, director of the Bradford Institute for Health Research, said: “The TPP connection is crucial to what we are trying to do. SystmOne provides us with a fantastic opportunity to use networked medical records for medical research. This is the first time it has been done across a whole city. In Bradford, 70% of GPs use SystmOne, so the majority of these babies will have SystmOne records anyway.
“The patient record link between maternity, secondary and primary care is very important – it means that all the information about the child can be recorded in one place. If we can find out, for example, when a child gets asthma and we have consent from the family to look at the child’s record, we can then try to identify the cause.”
The Born in Bradford team will collect information about DNA, lifestyle, family and the environment in which the children grow up, and look at this information to disentangle the different causes of ill health, with the intention of working out how to prevent it.
Bradford is one of the biggest cities in the UK and recent reports have highlighted that the city’s health is a cause for concern. Particularly worrying is that Bradford’s infant mortality rate – the number of babies who die before they reach their first birthday – is amongst the highest in the country.
The causes of infant mortality and other problems facing Bradford’s babies are not well understood. Born in Bradford aims to find out more, so that it is possible to identify people at increased risk and maybe offer new treatments.
Professor Wright added: “Our key aims are to look at the causes and effects of environmental pollution in relation to pregnancy, low birth weight, diabetes and childhood obesity. By the second year of the project, we hope to be producing some cutting-edge research findings and be encouraging research in routine data collection across the NHS within the NHS IT systems.”
The trust say that SystmOne’s involvement will help the project achieve the goal of embedding research in care and encouraging collection of data for research as part of routine care.
Take-up for the project is currently over 80% and Professor Wright says prospective parents are happy to take part.
“We’ve had a positive reaction from families – there’s a real sense of people wanting to contribute and to help us answer some of the big research questions of our time.”
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Joe Fernandez