UK LLC - COVID-19: Longitudinal Health & Wellbeing –National Core Study

The UKRI funded Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing National Core Study aims to understand the health, social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by uniting established population cohorts and national anonymised electronic health records to inform policy.

The Study is led by UCL with researchers based at Oxford, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Swansea, Cambridge, York, West of England, King’s College London, the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Bradford Institute for Health Research and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

There are several themes that the LH&W NCS is researching.

First there is widespread expectation that the pandemic is likely to have had immediate and longer-term mental health consequences, and these are likely to have impacted individuals differently. The mental health theme aims to provide the most robust answers possible to key questions related the mental health impacts of the pandemic (both related to COVID-19 infection and wider impacts of the mitigation measures).

Second, we aim to understand the economic, social and health impacts of the pandemic, the extent to which it is widening or narrowing inequalities, and the factors which shape vulnerability and resilience to its effects. Thirdly, we aim to understand the full extent of changes in the delivery of routine health care caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Finally, we are committed to undertaking rapid response-mode research on high priority topics identified by Government and policy makers.

For all three of these research themes we are employing longitudinal population-based cohorts, linked administrative data and electronic health records to produce novel and impactful insights to reduce the impact of the pandemic.