How we use your personal information (for medical research participants)

As a University we use personally-identifiable information to conduct research to improve health, care and services. As a publicly-funded organisation, 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 tell you how we need to use your data to conduct and analyse that study. Your rights to access, change or move your information are limited, as 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. To safeguard your rights, we will use the minimum personally-identifiable information possible.

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.

For more general information about how we use personal data about research participants, please see our webpage: https://www.information-compliance.admin.cam.ac.uk/data-protection/research-participant-data

For more general information about how patient data is used in research in the UK, please see the NHS Health Research Authority leaflet on Patient data and research: http://www.hra.nhs.uk/patientdataandresearch

If you have any questions you can contact the study team for the research you are participating in.  However you can also always contact the University’s Data Protection Officer: dpo@admin.cam.ac.uk

*For research purposes, our lawful basis for processing personal data and special category data are:

 UK GDPR - Article 6(1)(e), Supporting tasks in the public interest

 UK GDPR - Article 9(2)(j) Processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, or scientific and historical research purposes