COVID-19 contingency response

CPRD is open for business as usual during this period and our staff are working to ensure we continue to provide the services you need in the current environment. We recognise the need for enabling essential COVID-19 research that could impact public health policy and have put in place measures to facilitate this. This does mean that some of our services will need to be scaled back slightly to make this happen.

CPRD is expediting processing of protocols relating to COVID-19 research. To ascertain whether your protocol is eligible for rapid review please email rdg@cprd.com before you submit your application and include a clear impact statement in terms of public health safety or policy. More details are available on the Research applications page. Consequently, non-COVID-19 applications may experience a delay beyond the usual processing times for protocol feedback and data delivery.

As part of our expedited services where relevant, CPRD will be supporting expedited data access for urgent COVID-19 studies. We are aware that some clients are experiencing difficulties in accessing data via the CPRD online tools. This is due to an unusually high number of data extracts which have increased the demands on our systems. Our technical team is working on optimising the portal and associated online applications to deal with this and improve access to our data.

Finally, for this period, we will not be taking on any validation or questionnaire studies unless they are part of an approved COVID-19 research study.

We apologise for this inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we endeavour to provide the research community with essential research services during this period. We will keep you informed if this situation changes.

Find out what is happening across the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.