the Northern Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering Team (NMPCE), working as part of the NIHR Newcastle In Vitro Diagnostics Co-operative (NIHR Newcastle MIC), have been concentrating their efforts on the evaluation of COVID-19 diagnostics within multiple settings.
The recently published analysis (doi:10.1111/coa.13707) of Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) is the largest study of paediatric tonsillectomy in England: including 318,453 procedures conducted over 11 years, with a median per-patient follow-up of 6 years. It reports that 98.7% of children experienced no in‐hospital complications but that rates of readmission for bleeding within 28 days are increasing; with significant differences in safety outcomes (bleeding, pain and return to theatre) identified between coblation and dissection tonsillectomy across the study period.
Scientists from NMPCE have led a national project to study the safety and efficacy of using endoscopic balloon dilatation to treat narrowing of airways in children. The study is reported in a recent paper, written in collaboration with clinical colleagues from Newcastle, Alder Hey, Guy’s & St Thomas’, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital, Sheffield Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street and the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. It found that procedural success was achieved in 88% of patients and 6% of procedures were associated with in-hospital complications, with no long-term adverse safety concerns. The study provides important evidence that will support updates to national guidance.
A study, led by investigators from NMPCE, has reported evidence for the efficacy of bronchial thermoplasty (BT), a novel non-pharmacological therapy intended for people with severe asthma, in routine UK clinical practice. It is the largest real-world study of BT to date, and followed 133 patients who were treated at one of the 11 UK centres which offered the procedure.
An article written by an NMPCE scientist has set a new record for the journal Physiological Measurement by gaining more than 1000 citations. The paper by John Allen, Photoplethysmography and… Read more »
A research study of complications associated with mesh implants, led by authors from NMPCE, has become one of the top 100 most highly accessed articles of 2017 in Scientific Reports, an open-access Nature journal which published more than 24,000 papers during the year.