The Children’s Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) programme has been awarded a £3.7m investment from UK Research and Innovation’s Medical Research Council (MRC) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The programme is led by researchers at Oxford Population Health’s National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit.
The CSOR programme aims to identify any differences between hospitals in the care that they provide for children who have six conditions that are likely to need an operation early in life. The programme also looks at how the care may affect the children’s health and quality of life as they get older. The findings are then used to provide hospitals with recommendations for how they can improve care for these children.
Building upon the existing CSOR programme, the new investment will be used to offer participation in the programme to all paediatric surgical hospitals in the UK. It will also be used to ensure that valuable information, such as children’s educational outcomes, clinical imaging and biochemical data are incorporated into the CSOR research database to create a globally unique, population-based resource that can support research into improving the health and wellbeing of children with complex surgical conditions.
The impact of this data resource will be demonstrated through a study of necrotising enterocolitis, a condition affecting premature infants, to improve understanding of the optimal timings of surgical interventions and how chances of survival post-operation could be improved. This resource has the potential to answer questions about a range of conditions, including Hirschsprung’s disease, gastroschisis, congenital diaphragmatic hernia and oesophageal atresia, that are currently unanswerable due to the small scale of existing datasets.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.