TY - JOUR T1 - OpenSAFELY NHS Service Restoration Observatory 2: changes in primary care clinical activity in England during the COVID-19 pandemic JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - e318 LP - e331 DO - 10.3399/BJGP.2022.0301 VL - 73 IS - 730 AU - Helen J Curtis AU - Brian MacKenna AU - Milan Wiedemann AU - Louis Fisher AU - Richard Croker AU - Caroline E Morton AU - Peter Inglesby AU - Alex J Walker AU - Jessica Morley AU - Amir Mehrkar AU - Sebastian CJ Bacon AU - George Hickman AU - David Evans AU - Tom Ward AU - Simon Davy AU - William J Hulme AU - Orla Macdonald AU - Robin Conibere AU - Tom Lewis AU - Martin Myers AU - Shamila Wanninayake AU - Kiren Collison AU - Charles Drury AU - Miriam Samuel AU - Harpreet Sood AU - Andrea Cipriani AU - Seena Fazel AU - Manuj Sharma AU - Wasim Baqir AU - Chris Bates AU - John Parry AU - Ben Goldacre AU - The OpenSAFELY Collaborative Y1 - 2023/05/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/73/730/e318.abstract N2 - Background The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted healthcare activity across a broad range of clinical services. The NHS stopped non-urgent work in March 2020, later recommending services be restored to near-normal levels before winter where possible.Aim To describe changes in the volume and variation of coded clinical activity in general practice across six clinical areas: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, mental health, female and reproductive health, screening and related procedures, and processes related to medication.Design and setting With the approval of NHS England, a cohort study was conducted of 23.8 million patient records in general practice, in situ using OpenSAFELY.Method Common primary care activities were analysed using Clinical Terms Version 3 codes and keyword searches from January 2019 to December 2020, presenting median and deciles of code usage across practices per month.Results Substantial and widespread changes in clinical activity in primary care were identified since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with generally good recovery by December 2020. A few exceptions showed poor recovery and warrant further investigation, such as mental health (for example, for ‘Depression interim review’ the median occurrences across practices in December 2020 was down by 41.6% compared with December 2019).Conclusion Granular NHS general practice data at population-scale can be used to monitor disruptions to healthcare services and guide the development of mitigation strategies. The authors are now developing real-time monitoring dashboards for the key measures identified in this study, as well as further studies using primary care data to monitor and mitigate the indirect health impacts of COVID-19 on the NHS. ER -