How to count patients admitted to hospital with covid-19?
On 26 April, Robert Neil Whittaker defends his doctoral thesis in which he has examined the monitoring of hospital patients who were admitted with covid-19 in Norwegian hospitals between February 2020 and May 2022.
Main content
Throughout the acute phase of the 'coronavirus disease 2019' (covid-19) pandemic (between March 2020 and May 2022), ongoing monitoring of patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 was essential in order to have an overview of the burden at the hospitals and for the handling of the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic in Norway, three different systems for that surveillance were created. One was an aggregated, manual report on occupancy at the hospitals, and two were based on data from national electronic health registers.
The research in this thesis compared and critically assessed these new systems. It shows that each system gave an accurate picture of the number of hospitalized covid-19 patients in Norway over time. The strengths and weaknesses of each system are highlighted and provide important lessons for improving such monitoring for both covid-19 and in future health crises.
The thesis also includes research that used data from the various systems and other national registers to investigate whether new factors affected the risk of becoming seriously ill with covid-19.
See the full press release with times for the trial lecture and defense her (Norwegian):
https://www.uib.no/nye-doktorgrader/169673/hvordan-telle-pasienter-inlag...
