DHSC independent report - Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis (7 April 2022)

Summary

This is the report of Professor Ben Goldacre’s review into how the efficient and safe use of health data for research and analysis can benefit patients and the healthcare sector. It sets out a practical vision of how the Department of Health and the NHS can curate, manage and analyse the huge volume of health data available in the UK, and then communicate and use that data to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health services.

Content

Ben Goldacre in his review makes the following recommendations:

• Use people with technical skills to manage complex technical problems.
• Build impatiently, but incrementally, accepting that new ways of working are overdue, but cannot replace old methods overnight: we must build skills, and prove the value of modern approaches to data in parallel to maintaining old services and teams.
• Identify a range of ‘data pioneer’ groups from each key sector.
• Build Trusted Research Environment (TRE) capacity by taking a hands-on approach to the components of work common to all TREs.
• Focus on platforms by resourcing teams, services and institutions who are focused solely on facilitating great analytic work by other people, working closely with users. Data curation, secure analytics, TREs, libraries, RAP training, and platforms are the key missing link: they will only be delivered if they become high status, independent activities.