Page 10 - Doing Data Together by The Scotsman

DOINGDATATOGETHER
PROFESSOR
FIONA DENISON
Day job Professor
of translational
obstetrics, director of
Edinburgh Tommys
Centre
Project Evaluation
of home blood pressure monitoring in pregnancy
What was the specific aim of the project?
Covid-19 presented a considerable challenge to maternity services
to maintain safe, women-centred care while minimising the risks of spreading the virus.
Maternity services responded rapidly to reduce face-to-face contacts. Blood pressure (BP) monitoring and urine analysis
are key aspects of antenatal care, so supported home monitoring is required for women with or at high risk of developing hypertensive complications of pregnancy, or who are shielding due to serious underlying medical conditions.
The project aimed to investigate the impact of the rapid roll-out of supported home-monitoring of BP during the pandemic.
What have you achieved?
We established a multidisciplinary clinical and research team to implement the home BP and urine analysis programme. Clinical protocols and information for women have been produced and research governance procedures completed. The clinical work
is being rolled out: 22 pregnant women in the Edinburgh area are now using BP monitors and the programme is also operating in other NHS board areas.
How might your findings assist future work?
The project provides a template for how clinicians, service managers, policy-makers and researchers can work together to make change in the NHS happen quickly and effectively.
Evaluation will provide evidence of the safety and efficiency of
the programme, enabling wider implementation, and provide a toolkit for larger-scale evaluations.
It is anticipated home monitoring will become an established part of routine antenatal care for pregnant women who require increased surveillance of their BP.
WELINA LACKA Day job Lecturer in digital
marketing and analytics Project Post- Covid 19 Edinburgh Tourism Recovery
What was the specific aim of the project?
Our team – Professor Jake Ansell, Dr Johannes De Smedt, Antonia Gieschen and myself –
want to assist Edinburgh-based tourism businesses in their efforts to recover from the impact of Covid-19.
We aim to provide data-driven insights into international markets and assess their intentions to visit, as well as whether they can afford to visit Edinburgh post-Covid-19.
What have you achieved?
We have consolidated data from various industry partners, in collaboration with Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG),
VisitScotland and Historic Environment Scotland, to identify the most important international markets.
The team has explored whether people from these countries are showing interest in visiting, and if they can afford the visit.
We identified a number of countries which show strong intentions to visit, but also countries that at the moment do not show interest in visiting.
Insights from our project
will allow tourism businesses to make data-led decisions on which international markets to focus on during the recovery to ensure stable tourism growth in Edinburgh and Scotland.
We are currently working on
a freely available visualisation tool, to assist tourism businesses in their decisions which international markets to target.
How might your findings assist future work?
The project intends to continue to monitor and advise ETAG during the implementation stage of the findings, and assist in developing marketing activities.
Our team will maintain the visualisation tool to show how intentions to visit Edinburgh change over time.
We will seek additional funding opportunities to support businesses in their efforts to resume operations following the Covid-19 lockdown.
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