Published 12 May 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1961
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1961

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Researchers have failed to ease access to patients’ data for research

Clare Dyer

1 BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Researchers seem to have lost the battle for "bureaucratic" controls to be lifted on the use of data in which patients are identifiable.

The government is to go ahead with setting up research "safe havens," bodies such as the NHS Information Centre that will be allowed to collect identifiable patient data, process it into anonymised and pseudonymised data, and provide data in both identifiable and non-identifiable form for use in research.

But the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care believes that under current legislation the safe havens will need the approval of its ethics and confidentiality committee to collect, store, and process identifiable data and to supply it to researchers.

And scientists wanting to use identifiable data without patients’ consent for a research project will still need to seek the approval of the committee, which replaces the outgoing Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG).

Researchers have long complained . . . [Full text of this article]


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