Recent paper outputs from the OpenSAFELY Community

In the past 6 months we’ve been very productive at OpenSAFELY. We’ve published 21 peer-reviewed papers, led by people from ten different organisations, on a variety of topics.

We’ve generated insights about how people’s health was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, including changes to prescribing patterns; effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines; long-term effects of COVID-19 infection; and more.

We’ve also improved our understanding about how data gets recorded in primary care, and described how OpenSAFELY promotes reproducible research.

A few highlights:

• Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine showed that self-reported long COVID has a major impact quality-of-life, using our new service combining self-reported smartphone app data with electronic health records. The burden was highest among people in the workforce, and with pre-existing health conditions.
• Researchers from the University of Bristol looked at the effectiveness of COVID-19 booster vaccines, finding substantial protection against hospitalisation and death.
• Using weight and BMI recorded in primary care, researchers from Queen Mary University found that rapid weight gain during the pandemic was common in people with diabetes or hypertension. Females, younger adults, people living in more deprived areas, and people with mental health conditions were most likely to have rapid weight gain.
• We described ethnicity recording in raw GP data, finding we could identify a recorded ethnicity for most people (93%) by using data from both primary care and hospital admissions, which was consistent with census data. We also developed efficient, shared methods for data cleaning and data processing to improve accuracy and avoid bias.

None of this work would have been possible without the many contributions of people with a variety of expertise - epidemiologists, statisticians, clinical informaticians, and software developers, and more.

We are always keen for more people to come work with us, and contribute to the growing body of research produced using OpenSAFELY. If you’d like to be involved in the next stage of OpenSAFELY, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.