IORD


IORD is the Infections in Oxfordshire Research Database

"Infections can be dangerous: we are trying to find out more about them to control and manage them better and ultimately to improve people's experiences in hospital" 
 
Goals 

1. To improve the management of infection in UK hospitals. 
2. To use routinely recorded electronic data on hospital administration records (eg admission/discharges and ward movements) and results of microbiology, virology and other laboratory tests, following anonymisation, to prospectively investigate 
(a) trends in incidence of different bugs in Oxfordshire, within and outside the hospital: are new bugs starting to cause problems? 
(b) predictors of infection with different bugs: what increases the risk of developing infections? 
(c) severity of infection with different bugs, including adverse outcomes: are some infections becoming more or less serious? 
3. To use this data together with research data from detailed studies (eg gene strain typing, diagnostics), to understand more fully how and why particular strains of a bug become more dangerous (or "virulent").  

Data sources 

IORD includes completely anonymised information from two different sources; 
 
1. Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust Safety System (OUH PSS). This is an NHS database used for clinical service, it includes the patient administration system (PAS), pathology (microbiology, virology, laboratory), and infection control (ICE) databases. The PAS data is from both the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust (NOC).  
2. Research data generated through activities of the Infection Theme of the Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, Oxford.   

What does anonymised mean?  

Within the 2 different data sources individuals are identified by hospital numbers, and samples (and bugs!) by laboratory identifiers. Every day data is taken from these sources, and the personal identifiers are removed and replaced with a single identifier, such as "8619744". No names or addresses, hospital or NHS numbers are therefore used or stored in IORD.   

What we have found 
Publications 
Ongoing approved projects     

If you have any concerns regarding your data or your relatives' data being used for research please email jaim.sutton@ndm.ox.ac.uk to discuss this with a member of the team.