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

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 …