UK Medical Education Database: an issue of assumed consent
Editor – There are some significant misconceptions in the letter on UKMED by Best et al.1 UKMED is a partnership between data providers from across the health and education sectors to evaluate medical career progression. This will help to raise education standards by enabling us to assess the predictive validity of assessments.
Data protection and privacy considerations have been at the heart of UKMED's development and the bodies involved take their safeguarding of information extremely seriously. The legislation states that the General Medical Council, which is the data controller for UKMED, must carry out its activities proportionately and use personal data fairly. For this reason, when a doctor or student provides their information to one of the organisations that contribute to UKMED, they are told what that data will be used for, including research of this kind. Each contributing organisation has a privacy notice that indicates data sharing may take place.
UKMED does not provide any identifiable data to potential employers and data are not used to monitor or make decisions about individual doctors. Only anonymised data are shared with approved academic researchers under the terms of a strict contract in a safe haven2 to prevent attempts at re-identification.
Data are held in UKMED for research purposes only. Doctors’ information can't be used to make decisions that could impact on their career, either positively or negatively.
We are committed to transparency in the operation of UKMED. Doctors can find out more about the way UKMED is run on the website, including details of the process for accessing research datasets.3 The British Medical Association represents the interests of medical students and doctors on the UKMED development group.
We hope that medical students and trainees recognise the need for an evidence-based approach to medical education. UKMED facilitates this without infringing on privacy.
- © Royal College of Physicians 2017. All rights reserved.
References
- Best R, Walsh JL, Harris BHL, Wilson D. UK Medical Education Database: an issue of assumed consent. Clin Med 2016;16:605.
- Health Informatics Centre. Safe haven user guide. Dundee: Health Informatics Centre, 2015. https://medicine.dundee.ac.uk/sites/medicine.dundee.ac.uk/files/Safe%20haven%20User%20Guide.pdf [Accessed 25 January 2017].
- UK Medical Education Database. Process for completing UKMED research. London: UKMED, 2016. www.ukmed.ac.uk/documents/UKMED_research_process.pdf [Accessed 25 January 2017].
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