The Health Improvement Network (THIN) research team

Primary Care Database User Group Meetings

Our next PDUG meeting will be on 22 May from 3.30-5.00pm at the Royal Free. Dr Dani Prieto-Alhambra, senior clinical research fellow at the University of Oxford, will tell us about SIDIAP, a Spanish primary care database covering 274 primary care practices and almost 6 million patients in the Spanish Catalonia region. The database currently covers 80% of the Catalan population.

You can sign up to the Primary Care Database User Group mailing list by registering on JISCMail.

Directions to the Royal Free are available on our contact page. We also have a map with directions to our department in the Royal Free.

Previous events

26-27 January 2012 - Primary Care Database Symposium

A two-day symposium, organised by the Infectious Disease Research Network in conjunction with University College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Previous Primary Care Database User-group meetings:

(All presentations are available from our publications pages)

9 April 2013

Dr Anoop Shah presented his Freetext Matching Algorithm (FMA), a program which can convert free text entered by clinicians into relevant Read codes. His presentation is available on our publications pages, and the program, and the paper describing the program, are available free and open access on BioMed Central.

5 February 2013

Our first PDUG meeting of 2013 featured a short presentation by Myriam Alexander on the exploration of multiple measurements of cardiovascular risk factors in THIN. This was followed by Laura Shallcross who presented some results of her PhD project on skin infections in primary care.

4 December 2012

Katie Harron from the UCL Institute of Child Health gave a talk on data linkage and what can go wrong when linking datasets. Her presentation is available on our website.

16 October 2012

The meeting was about the development of reporting guidelines for electronic health records (RECORD). More information is available from the RECORD website: www.record-statement.org and Sinéad Langan's PDUG presentation.

19 September 2012

We started the new academic year with a very special user group meeting featuring Dr Tarek Hammad, deputy director for the Division of epidemiology at the US Food and Drug Agency (FDA). He talked about the role of epidemiology in drug safety from a regulatory perspective.

9 July 2012

Jordana Peake, from the UCL Institute for Women's Health presented on the use of patient identifiable information for data linkage for research into neural tube defects in ethnic communities. And Jenny Woodman, from the UCL Institute for Child Health, told us about the role of the GP for children with (possible) abuse and neglect: a mixed methods study.

14 June 2012

This usergroup meeting focussed on time series analyses. Lisa Szatkowski and Tessa Langley from the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies and University of Nottingham presented their work on evaluation of tobacco control policies: Evaluating tobacco control policies using time series analysis: examples and reflections. Some of their work is detailed in a recent paper using structural vector autoregression analysis.

28 March 2012

We had three speakers, who all have substantial experience with analysing HES data. Pia Hardelid (ICH, UCL), Nick Freemantle (PCPH, UCL) and Ruth Gilbert (ICH, UCL). Pia provided us with an overview of HES data and how it is organised, Nick told us about a study he was involved in that used HES data to assess whether weekend hospitalisation is associated with an increased risk of death, and finally, Ruth shared her expertise on validating codes in HES. All three presentations can found in our publications sections.

7 November 2011

Ruth Brauer from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) told us all about her work on antipsychotic agents and myocardial infarction. She compared the results from a case control study to a self-controlled case series design.

28 September 2011

Cathy Welch told us about a two stage method to identify outliers in electronic databases. The slides from this presentation can be found here, and the paper discussed is in press, but will be added to our publications list once it is available.

18 July 2011

Gareth James, a member of our very own THIN team, gave a talk about prevalence and patterns of long term prophylactic antibiotic use in COPD, and how to use multiple imputation to account for missing data in antibiotic prescribing. His presentation can be found here.

28 March 2011

Beatrix De La Iglesia from the University of East Anglia talked about the work for their recent publication in Heart: "Performance of the ASSIGN cardiovascular disease risk score on a UK cohort of patients from general practice".