Northern Care Alliance (NCA) NHS Foundation Trust is working with The University of Manchester on a research project to improve healthcare for people with musculoskeletal conditions (problems with joints, bones and muscles) including arthritis. To find out more about the research, please watch this short video by visiting https://bit.ly/48akpJO or scanning this QR code:
The project aims to understand:
- How many of the people attending the rheumatology Outpatient Department use council funded social care? Does social care need and use of services change according to the condition diagnosed?
- Amongst those receiving council funded care in the above group, how many also receive informal care (care from family and friends) and what types of activities of daily living do social care services provide help with? What are the costs of social care for patients in this group?
To do this work, a team at Northern Care Alliance will link some data from social care records with some data from hospital outpatient records.
How does this affect me?
If you are over 18, attended rheumatology outpatient clinics at Salford Royal Hospital between 2013 and 2021 and you are also in receipt of social care from Salford City Council during January to December 2022 – your data may be included.
This means that staff working at Northern Care Alliance Foundation Trust will take some data from your hospital record and some data from your social care record and store it together for this research. Any information that could identify you such as your name, address and NHS number will be removed, and your data will be marked using a unique number. To find out more about how your privacy is protected, you can watch the short video or contact business.intelligence@nca.nhs.uk
The data will be stored on the hospital computer network. Staff working on the project at NCA and researchers will be given a log-in and password to allow them to work with this data. All of these people will have completed training in how to protect the privacy of patients by keeping data secure. At the end of an agreed time period, the data is deleted. The project has been reviewed by the Confidentiality Advisory Group, who check to make sure that the research will benefit patients and that the privacy of patients is protected as much as possible.
I don’t want my data to be used, can I opt out?
If you have already opted out of having your medical records used for research, you don’t need to do anything. If you have not already opted out, but you would prefer that your data is not used for this project, you can email business.intelligence@nca.nhs.uk. You can also write to Business Intelligence Research, 631 Eccles New Road, Salford, M50 1SY, or call 0161 206 4250 and ask for first line support.
Please include your name and NHS number so that NCA staff can make sure that your patient data is not included. If you don’t have your NHS number you can find it using by visiting this page https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/online-services/find-nhs-number/ or scanning this QR code:
If you are interested in the results of this study, you can find updates at https://tinyurl.com/Assembling-the-Data-Jigsaw or by scanning this QR code:
