PRANA Registry: Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network

Lay Description

Each day across the UK, people become suddenly unwell or get injured. In 2022-2023, ambulance services nationally attended to a total of 8 million patients, delivering immediate care and transporting patients to hospital. A small proportion (estimated 0.5%) of these patients were so severely ill or injured that their lives were immediately threatened (40,000 patients).

At present there is no nationally coordinated data collection regarding provision of pre-hospital critical care in the UK. Whilst patient specific data is collected by the ambulance services across their pre-hospital care pathway, data regarding pre-hospital critical care treatment is not currently collated beyond provider organisations nor linked to outcome. Therefore, the potential systematic improvements created through national data collection, analysis, review and publication are currently absent within UK pre-hospital critical care.

To answer this national deficit, a team of researchers from across the country have collaborated to create a pre- hospital critical care registry based within the Wessex sub-national Secure Data Environment. The registry is called the Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network (PRANA).

The PRANA registry intends to enable data from critically ill and injured patients’ whole care pathways (from moment of recognition of illness or injury onwards) to be utilised to improve understanding of pre-hospital disease, improved diagnosis and treatments of pre-hospital disease, reduce risk for patients and clinicians, evaluate the impact of new professional roles on the UK health economy, enable future service planning and improvement, evaluate the effectiveness of health policy, identify targets for disease prevention, inform prevention of injury and illness and enable future research and innovation.

The PRANA registry is aligned with the principles detailed in the NHS Data Strategy ‘Data saves lives’:

• Improving trust in the health and care system’s use of data through citizen and user engagement and involvement
• Supporting local decision-makers with data
• Empowering researchers with the data they need to develop life-changing treatments and diagnostics
• Working with partners to develop innovations that improve health and care
• Developing the right technical infrastructure.

Public Benefit Statement

PRANA is strongly aligned to delivering public benefit.

Strategic Priorities for Wessex SDE:

Save the NHS money through prevention and long-term health improvements for everyone

• Reducing serious injury and death from road traffic accidents will be our first focus area for pilot research using PRANA. Two projects have been funded by the DfT to use our newly linked data to highlight how improvements can be made in prevention and treatment with a focus on pre-hospital care

Create new knowledge and avoid unnecessary repetition

• Linking PRANA datasets for the first time will allow us to create an incredibly valuable resource that will enable new types of research and for pre-hospital care crews to better understand and improve the treatments that are provided for long-term health benefits

Quickly deliver results using existing data and resources

• Once the data is linked in the SDE PRANA will provide a first in a lifetime opportunity to look at the causes and impacts of the pre-hospital care pathway to deliver new insights and research capabilities not possible anywhere else in the world

A public benefit that would raise awareness of the SDE and build reputation

• The linked PRANA data there will provide a huge opportunity to demonstrate the value of our SDE and the SDE Network as whole. Outcomes will be actively shared and promoted via all channels including both public and researchers. This will attract new researchers and funding nationally and internationally as a result.