Safe havens: charter

Purpose

The purpose of this Charter is to set out the operational framework for Safe Havens in Scotland. Safe Havens are established in Scotland to:

1. Support Public Health and Healthcare Improvements: Enable research that can lead to more effective, safer health services and treatments, and contribute to a better understanding of the economic, societal, and environmental causes and development of diseases.

2. Ensure Ethical Research: Ensure all health and social care research and innovation conducted within the Safe Havens adheres to the highest ethical standards^[2]and legal requirements, maintaining public trust and integrity.

3. Protect Individuals Privacy: Implement robust measures to safeguard patient identity and privacy, ensuring that data from electronic NHS patient records is processed, linked, and analysed in a secure platform while facilitating the approval process for data access.

4. Facilitate High-Quality and Innovative Research: Support the advancement of scientifically sound research by providing researchers with access to comprehensive and well-maintained data sets within secure compute platforms.

5. Promote Collaboration: Encourage collaborative research efforts across regional and national Safe Havens within Scotland and across the UK, aiming for whole Scotland coverage or as close to it as practical. This federated approach promotes a more inclusive research environment, engaging industry and maximising the collective impact of health and social care research.

The Safe Haven Charter sets out operating principles and standards to support the Safe Havens to achieve these aims, guide a unified approach to health and social care research and innovation across the SSHN, and maintain the highest levels of ethical conduct and data protection, providing reassurance to data controllers.

It is expected that this charter will be reviewed and evolve in light of information governance and technical developments. For this reason, the Charter sets out principles with the details in the annexes, allowing for easier adaptation over time.