Newcastle Hospitals data linkage for research programme
Research type
Research Database
IRAS ID
266579
Contact name
Miles Witham
Contact email
Research summary
Transforming research with routinely collected linked clinical data using an umbrella ethics and governance approach at Newcastle Hospitals
REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/EM/0186
Date of REC Opinion
10 Aug 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion
Data collection arrangements
No new data will be collected or stored by this project. Instead, this proposal will provide an umbrella governance and ethics framework to allow many different research projects to be conducted using existing health care records.
Data are already stored by Newcastle Hospitals as part of their Electronic Health Record. This governance framework will allow approvals for different sets of data to be linked together, have personal identifiers (for instance, names, addresses, date of birth) removed, and the anonymised data will then be placed into a separate area of the NHS IT system so that research teams can analyse only the data that is necessary for their particular analysis.
Research programme
There are potentially hundreds of projects that can be done using these linked datasets – projects that are likely to have direct benefit to patient care within NuTH, or which can benefit patient care more widely in the UK and beyond. In order to gain the maximum benefit from research using electronic patient records, systems are required that balance the need to keep patient data secure and confidential with the need to allow researchers to use data in an efficient way. This protocol provides a streamlined way for clinical researchers to access clinical data held by NuTH whilst preserving data security and confidentiality and provides mechanisms to ensure appropriate use of the data. It does so without the need for each individual project or analysis to be processed separately by a research ethics committee and by the Health Research Authority. This will reduce the workload for administrative staff and researchers, and thus will enable more research to be done more rapidly, with benefit to a wide range of different patient groups.
Research database title
Transforming research with routinely collected linked clinical data using an umbrella ethics and governance approach at Newcastle Hospitals
Establishment organisation
Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust
Establishment organisation address
Regent Point
Regent Farm Road
Gosforth
NE3 3HD