CRIS blog: Inpatient use and area-level socio-environmental factors in people with psychosis

Dr Margaret Heslin is a research fellow and honorary lecturer in King’s Health Economics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London.

There is convincing evidence that differences in social environmental factors such as social deprivation and urban environment are associated with varying risk of developing psychosis. However, there has been very little research on whether these same enviromental factors are associated with how a person’s illness develops over time. We aimed to use data held within Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS)  to determine if five key enviromental factors - deprivation, ethnic density, social capital, population density and social fragmentation – were associated with a single easy to measure outcome – time in hospital for mental health reasons.

Although we found no associations between inpatient use and social environmental factors, this paper details the challenges that need to be overcome when examinging social epidemiological questions of this type when using electronic record data.

This work was a pilot study designed to show the potential for linking patient outcomes with area-level social environmental factors. The next step is to look at more relevant and less arbitrary outcomes such as recovery from illness, symptom trajectory and mortality.

Read the paper online at: Inpatient use and area-level socio-environmental factors in people with psychosis  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-018-1534-x

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Tags: CRIS - Clinical and population informatics - Informatics - Psychosis & neuropsychiatry - Publications -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 13 Jun 2018, 11:36 AM


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