Natasha Chilman
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, my name is Dr Natasha Chilman, I’m from King’s College London, and I’m going to tell you about my SIRS talk which is taking place on Tuesday, where I will be presenting our study on inequities in mortality following a COVID-19 infection for people with severe mental illness.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted health disparities faced by people with severe mental illness, which includes people schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other non-organic psychoses. Concerningly, international studies have shown that people with severe mental illness experienced excess mortality following a COVID-19 infection compared to people without severe mental illness. However, the problem with our current evidence-base is that most of these studies were conducted during the pandemic or in the very immediate aftermath, which means follow-ups tend to be limited and focused on early stages of the pandemic.
This matters, because we now live in a post-COVID-19-pandemic era, where vaccines have been developed and rolled out, and there are no restrictions. However we do not know whether mortality inequities for people with severe mental illnesses stayed the same, got worse, or better after the public health emergency phase and after the vaccination roll-out. Investigating mortality trends throughout and beyond the pandemic is also critical to ensuring an equitable response to future public health crises.
Our study aimed to fill this gap by investigating mortality for people with SMI across different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
In my talk I will describe how we used an innovative whole-country data-linkage for our study.
The British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre CVD-COVID-UK dataset includes all people registered in primary care services in England since November 2019, which includes over 58-million people. The primary care dataset is linked to multiple other population-level datasets, including hospital records, COVID-19 testing centres, COVID-19 vaccination records, and mortality records. The data is de-identified for access and analysis by approved researchers in a Secure Data Environment.
We analysed the records of over 13-million people who had positive covid-19 test or diagnosis between January 2020 and June 2023, to investigate mortality for people with severe mental illness at a scale which has not been possible in England until now.
Understanding inequities for people with severe mental illness throughout and since the COVID-19 pandemic is essential for our present and for our future. There are no spoilers here on our findings – but please join us on Tuesday to hear more about what we did and what we found! I look forward to meeting you.
