CCIO Weeknotes 1.3

DATA ACCESS

Following the Goldacre Review (not forgetting the contribution made by Jess Morley), there has been national investment in building sub regional Secure Data Environments (SDEs) to support safe and trustworthy research and innovation in the NHS. Greater Manchester has been fortunate to a partner in the North West SDE and after huge amounts of work to engage with the public, researchers and the Confidentiality Advisory Group we are now in the position of beginning to be able to test this incredible asset. 

Although there has been a huge effort to build a platform and usage process that used the five safes model to provision access in a secure, responsible manner, this will only work in an environment of robust, fair and transparent governance. This week saw the first projects considered at our Data Access Committee with an impressive level of debate and scrutiny. Importantly, there are public representatives engaged at every stage of the governance process and their input was critical both in the reviews and in providing feedback as to how we might improve our processes now we’ve run them for real. Maintaining public confidence will be critical to the success or otherwise of SDEs given the understandable concerns about data security and usage that are seen in national surveys. 

Equally important, and less well studied, are the views and concerns of data controllers in primary care. We are again lucky in GM to have so many GPs committed both to improvement of care AND to protecting the security and confidentiality of the data that patients have shared with them. The 2022 report commissioned by the RCP to explore Primary Care Professionals’ Attitudes to Data Use is interesting reading, framing three themes of questions and challenges 

• capability
• motivation
• opportunity.

I’m confident that we’ve built not only the technology, but also the communication and governance framework to enable all these criteria to be met. However we must not take any of this for granted and will always be open to challenge and ready to talk.