Led by Professor Gavin Pettigrew (Cambridge) and in partnership with NHSBT’s Biostatistics Team, this cross-cutting theme will utilise large NHS datasets to answer questions raised across the other BTRU themes. The aim is to test whether our research makes a difference and help design better services that improve access to transplantation and patient survival. The work of Theme 4 will be underpinned by a dedicated NHSBT statistician, Jenny Mehew, who will also support training in advanced statistics for BTRU trainees.
Major workstreams supported by this theme will include:
- Implementing a National Organ Perfusion Registry
- Designing an objective donor lung risk score to improve lung utilisation rates
- Developing a novel named lung allocation model using an analytic hierarchy process to analyse specific donor and recipient characteristics, improve matching and thereby increase lung utilisation
- Realising the potential of the organ quality assessment (OrQA) platform (Theme 2) in supporting decision-making around organ utilisation and for audit purposes
- Using the NHSBT Registry to generate surrogates for long-term outcomes (French iBOX principle)
Patient impact
- Increasing the number of transplants through enhanced organ utilisation
- Improving equity of access to transplantation
- Improving long-term outcomes from better understanding of the application of perfusion technologies
