Severe mental illness and monitoring of cardiovascular risk factors

Our project aims to understand how often GPs are checking the health of people with severe mental illness (SMI). SMI are a group of conditions that affect the day to day functioning of those who suffer with them. People with SMI are at increased risk of heart disease. They are more likely to smoke or be obese, and the drugs they take for their mental health can affect their physical health. Medical data in the UK is complicated, and so we want to provide resources for researchers who want to study heart disease in people with SMI. We want to see how six risk factors for heart disease are recorded in the different UK databases that hold medical information. This project will look at the data specifically for the NHS Lothian population. Then we want to see how often GPs are recording these risk factors and whether there are changes over time or by groups, such as ethnicity. The results will then be compared with the results from similar analysis we have completed using other health data from England and Wales.