Using data to improve public health: COVID-19 secondment

患者愿意从当地全科医生（GP）或医疗保健系统寻求治疗有助于提供充分的护理。这是国家卫生服务（NHS）的核心任务之一，以改善公众健康和福祉。延迟治疗与更高的整体医疗费用和不良的健康结果有关。COVID-19（C19）疫情对医疗系统及患者均产生深远影响。然而，C19对公众寻求及时治疗的意愿的影响仍然严重不足。借调将通过分析OpenSAFELY中完全匿名的患者数据来阐明这方面的问题。鉴于数据的严重编辑性质，代理需要用来说明医疗保健寻求行为。具体而言，在第一次全国封锁实施期间和所有限制取消之后，观察到患有急性疼痛的患者的就医行为。据推测，由于旨在保护NHS免于崩溃的公共卫生干预措施，在所有国家封锁事件中，缓解疼痛的医疗治疗都被推迟。同样，假设平均而言，这些特定优先获得医疗服务的病例（即，急性疼痛患者）继续存在，即使在所有保护性公共卫生措施已经取消。换句话说，据推测，一些患者没有像大流行之前那样迅速寻求缓解疼痛的治疗。对延迟治疗的竞争性解释进行了测试。其目的是确定相关的社会人口群体，这些群体将受益于有针对性的运动，以增加他们寻求及时治疗的倾向。

Patients' willingness to seek treatment from their local general practitioner (GP) or healthcare system is instrumental in delivering adequate care. It is one of the National Health Service's (NHS) core missions to improve public health and well-being. Delayed treatment has been associated with higher overall healthcare costs and poor health outcomes. The COVID-19 (C19) pandemic had a profound impact on both the healthcare system as well as on patients. However, the impact of C19 on public willingness to seek timely treatment remains critically understudied. The secondment will be used to shed light on this aspect by analysing fully anonymised patient data within OpenSAFELY. Given the heavily redacted nature of the data, proxies need to be used to illustrate healthcare seeking behaviour. Specifically, healthcare seeking behaviour from patients who suffer from acute pain are observed between the time the first national lockdown was introduced and after all restrictions had been lifted. It is hypothesized that medical treatment to alleviate pain was delayed during all national lockdown episodes due to public health interventions that aimed to protect the NHS from collapsing. Similarly, it is assumed that, on average, delayed medical treatment for these specific priority access cases (i.e., acute pain patients) continue to persist even after all protective public health measures had been lifted. In other words, it is hypothesized that some patients do not seek treatment for pain relief as fast as they would have prior to the pandemic. Competing explanations for delayed treatment are tested. The aim is to identify relevant sociodemographic groups that would benefit from targeted campaigns to increase their tendency to seek timely treatment.