RCGP Serological Surveillance Research

The RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre is currently recruiting GP practices in the North East and North West of England to take part in COVID-19 serological surveillance.

Serological surveillance entails practices taking an additional bottle of blood from patients who are coming into the practice for a prescheduled blood test.

The bloods will give us information about background population immunity to COVID-19. This is important in order to detect the number of infections within the population and to help inform public health surveillance and planning.

All materials for this work are provided: all the practitioner needs to do is to obtain verbal consent, stick the regular patient label onto the additional bottle and form, and post it in the prepaid envelope provided. This falls under Health Protection Regulation 3 so the practice would only need verbal consent.

This practice recruitment is time sensitive, as Public Health England would like to have new practices involved within the next two weeks so that they can start to collect the COVID-19 data as soon as possible.

We would be very grateful if you could also circulate this call through your networks.

To express interest in taking part in serological surveillance, please contact the RCGP Practice Liaison Team  and we will send you detailed information.

We understand that this is a very busy time for practices and would be very grateful for your participation or your help in disseminating this call to action.