VIROLOGY SURVEILLANCE
Preparing for another pandemic: RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre
The Royal College of General Practitioners’ Research and Surveillance Centre plays a key role in the UK’s disease surveillance and pandemic preparedness. Dominic Dunn explains how the role has developed in recent years and its plans for future growth and to involve more laboratories.
On 27 November, 2023, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) published a news release titled UKHSA detects human case of influenza A(H1N2)v. It was the first detection of this strain of influenza in a human in the UK and was detected as part of routine national influenza surveillance undertaken by UKHSA and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP).
The national primary care influenza surveillance of influenza and other infections mentioned is conducted by a network called the RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre (RSC). The RSC is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, RCGP, and UKHSA.
Research and Surveillance Centre
Swine influenza particles. 48
The RSC is one of the world’s oldest sentinel networks, collecting some data since 1957, but systematically publishing its Weekly Return of contemporaneously monitored conditions since 1967. Sentinel surveillance is sponsored by UKHSA and its predecessor bodies. Historically, the RSC comprised 100 nationally representative general practices with a population of around 0.5 million patients sharing data, and from 1993 collecting seasonal virology samples (generally between week 40 in one year through to week 20 in the next). Notwithstanding, GPs in the RSC network flagged the out-of-season swine influenza pandemic in July 2009 from the clinical diagnosis of influenza-like illness. The RSC grew, and by 2018 included over 500 practices (over five million patients), further expanding to 2,000 practices (over 19 million patients) after moving to Oxford before the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2000 the RSC added serological surveillance and asymptomatic virology to its virological sampling of
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‘Swine influenza particles’ by National Institutes of Health (NIH) is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0
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