Summertown Health Centre has a long history of collaborating with the National Institute for Health Research (https://www.nihr.ac.uk) and we’re continually bringing new studies into our surgery. Research helps to keep the NHS at the forefront of medical knowledge and technology and we’re very grateful whenever one of our patients takes the time to help out! In addition, the funding we receive from taking part in research goes towards our practice so we can afford to deliver better care.
Below, you can see some of the posters for our active studies. If you’re eligible, you’ll usually be invited either directly by your GP or nurse, or by receiving a text message or email. Most studies have quite narrow inclusion criteria based on age, previous medical history, current medications etc, so you may not be eligible even if you have the condition.
We do have several “open studies”, which are more freely available to you, you will be able to see links to these studies on our Research page.
Meet our research team:
Dr Charles Luo
Dr Kyle Knox
Katherine Blaze
Sarah Strange
Mandy Beckett
Tracy Kelly
Data and privacy
Opting out of research
You have the right not to take part in research if you don’t want to, and this will not affect your care in any way. If you would not like to be contacted, you can ask for a code to be placed on your medical record for the National Data Opt Out https://digital.nhs.uk/services/national-data-opt-out
This means that we will remove you from invitations to take part in research, and your data will not be used for research and audit purposes. If you change your mind, you can ask for the NDOO to be removed from your record and you will then be invited to any studies you are eligible for in the future
If you opted out of text message communications on your registration form or at a later date, you will not receive the majority of invitations to research studies.
Protecting your data
We place a lot of importance on protecting your confidential and sensitive data. All of the research studies are bound by UK data protection laws including the GDPR https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/.
Research studies obviously need to collect some data from you or about you. A lot of this data can be anonymous or pseudonymous, meaning you could never be identified from the data. For example, a study might collect your age and the fact that you have psoriasis, what medication you are taking and how often you have a flare up, and all of that data could be stored under your study identifier e.g. Participant number 109 - the data would not contain your name or address or phone number, and this would be known as pseudonymised data. We aim to work with the study teams so that anonymised or pseudonymised data collection is the default method of data collection
In some circumstances, it may not be possible for the study team to collect completely anonymised or pseudonymised data, and the study teams should make this clear to you during the consent process. However, even when there is identifiable data being collected by the study team, we do our best to make sure that it remains completely confidential and will not be shared with anyone outside of the study team, unless you have explicitly consented.
If you have shared confidential identifiable data with a study team and you wish for it to be withdrawn, you can request that the data is withdrawn as part of the UK GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” legislation