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Pandemic toolkit guides decisions for NHS trusts

Thousands of patients across 6 hospitals benefit from Brunel's pandemic planning toolkit.

The need

Brunel's local area houses 6 hospitals serving 1,290,000 citizens managed by two NHS Trusts: London North West University Healthcare (LNWH) and Hillingdon Hospitals. As the pandemic started Brunel experts worked with those NHS trusts to forecast the spread of Covid-19 in a local environment, such as a borough in London or a different city or region in the UK.

The solution

Groen and Bell (Computer Science) led research that was incorporated into a pandemic planning toolkit that directly informed planning decisions for two NHS trusts (London North West Heathcare and Hillingdon), including 6 hospitals serving 1,290,000 citizens. The toolkit relies on a combination of agent-based modelling algorithms that simulate individual behaviours. The code was validated against hospitalisation data of the first wave of COVID-19, and has shown good agreement with that validation data. 

The code was been developed in collaboration with the HiDALGO Centre of Excellence project and is applied to simulate COVID-19 spread in Madrid as part of that project. 

The outcome

  • An epidemiological simulation toolkit for large-scale COVID-19 forecast analysis that supports a wide range of public health interventions, such as social distancing, mask wearing and the closing of locations by type.

  • Automated access to large supercomputers (such as the Eagle supercomputer in Poznan (PL), and the SuperMUC-NG computer in Garching (DE)) to facilitate the rapid and reliable execution of complex simulations.

  • Rapid and robust verification, validation, uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis for a wide range of scientific applications.

Partnering with confidence

UKRI Research England

Organisations interested in our research can partner with us with confidence backed by an external and independent benchmark: The Knowledge Exchange Framework. Read more.

Case study last modified 14/10/2022

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