People admitted to hospital with multiple long-term conditions—such as heart disease alongside dementia—tend to stay longer, die more often, and recover more slowly than those with a single illness. Yet the NHS was designed to treat one condition at a time, leaving these patients with fragmented, inefficient care that is also expensive. The ADMISSION Research Collaborative brings together data scientists, clinicians, and geneticists to understand why certain clusters of physical and mental health conditions form, and how they affect a patient’s journey through the system. The team will analyse NHS records from hospitals in the North East, Birmingham, and Dundee, plus intensive care units across the UK, to map patterns of illness. They will also examine genetic data from UK Biobank participants and blood samples from a Scottish registry to explore the biological mechanisms behind these clusters. If successful, this work could lead to redesigned hospital care that treats the whole patient rather than each condition in isolation—improving recovery, reducing costs, and easing the burden on both patients and the health system.
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Why is multimorbidity important? Multimorbidity, that is living with multiple long-term health conditions, is very common in people admitted to hospital. These patients tend to stay in hospital for longer, are more likely to die, and may take much longer to recover when they are discharged. However, the way we deliver care for people with multiple long-term conditions is not ideal; in a system that was designed for single conditions, care can be unsatisfactory and inefficient for the patient - and is expensive for the healthcare provider, such as the NHS. The need for improvement is recognised, but there is currently little research on multimorbidity in hospital patients to help us to know how services need to be changed. Our research is designed to address this gap in understanding and is focused on people with multiple long-term conditions who are admitted to hospital. What is ADMISSION? We have formed a new Research Collaborative (called ADMISSION) that includes data scientists, statisticians, laboratory researchers, social scientists and clinical teams from UK universities (Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester Met, UCL, Dundee) to carry out research that will transform our understanding of multiple long-term conditions in hospital patients. By bringing together this expertise we will be able to use the power of 'big data' (from routine NHS and other datasets) to better understand the patterns and causes of multiple long-term conditions, and the effects of living with them. The Collaborative will use information collected by hospitals in the North East of England, Birmingham and Dundee, and from intensive care wards across the UK, to identify patients with long-term conditions. We will pay particular attention to patients who have a combination of physical health conditions (for example heart disease, lung disease, arthritis, falls and poor mobility) and mental health conditions (for example dementia and depression). What will ADMISSION do? Our planned research is divided into five linked work packages, with each helping the work of the others. Our first work package will build a library of information gathered from Newcastle Hospitals and will compare this with similar libraries of information from Birmingham hospitals and intensive care units across the UK. Our second work package will analyse this information to find patterns of health conditions as these tend to cluster together, so that we can look at the effects of background factors such as age, sex, and ethnicity on them (in our third work package). Our fourth work package will use information from ambulance services, accident and emergency, acute hospital admissions and general practice records to understand how we deliver health care to people with clusters of multiple long-term conditions, how they journey through the healthcare system and how we might be able to improve their experience of health and social care. Our final work package looks at the mechanisms that could explain what causes the clusters of long-term conditions; we will analyse genetic and other information from half a million people who signed up to the UK Biobank study to find out how genes vary between different clusters of conditions, and then test these ideas using blood samples collected from 3000 hospital patients in the SHARE Scotland registry. What will the end result of ADMISSION be? This work will lead to a step change in our understanding of how long-term conditions cluster together in hospital patients, why they cluster, and how these different clusters affect health and the delivery of health care. With this understanding we will be able to design new approaches to treat and prevent multiple long-term conditions, and to improve the health, function and quality of life of people who have them. It will also inform the redesign of health and social care systems so that they are better able to care for patients with multiple long-term conditions in the future.
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