How we use your personal information
The Quality, Safety and Outcomes (QSO) Policy Research Unit is a collaboration between: University of Kent, University of Oxford, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Picker Institute Europe and Hull York Medical School.
The University of Kent are the joint data controllers with the collaborative partners.
QSO uses personally-identifiable information to conduct research to improve health, care and services. We have to ensure that it is in the public interest when we use personally-identifiable information from people who have agreed to take part in research. This means that when you agree to take part in a research study, we will use your data in the ways needed to conduct and analyse the research study.
Personally-identifiable information that may be held include:
- Name, address, contact details and date of birth
- Characteristics (such as gender, age, ethnic group)
Health and care research should serve the public interest, which means that we have to demonstrate that our research serves the interests of society as a whole. We do this by following the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research.
Your rights and complaint processes
The General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018 provides the following rights for individuals
- The right to be informed
- The right of access
- The right to rectification
- The right to restrict processing
- The right to object
However, there may be circumstances where we are unable to comply with such requests because doing so would impair the outcome of our research. We need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. If you withdraw from the study, we will keep the information about you that we have already obtained and you will be unable to make a request for the deletion of that data. This is because data protection legislation has special provisions around research data. To safeguard your rights, we will use the minimum personal information possible and ensure that we process and store any personal data securely.
If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer at the University of Kent who will investigate the matter. If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data in a way that is not lawful you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
The University of Kent’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at: https://www.kent.ac.uk/infocompliance/dp/contact.html
The wording has been adapted from the Health Research Authority – https://www.hra.nhs.uk/planning-and-improving-research/policies-standards-legislation/data-protection-and-information-governance/gdpr-guidance/templates/transparency-wording-public-sector/