The Scottish Health Research Register (SHARE) (https://www.registerforshare.org) is an example of a participant recruitment service that seeks consent from people across Scotland to contact them regarding healthcare research participation opportunities, and for their Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to be used to identifying eligible participants for health care research. SHARE is an NHS Scotland Research (NRS) infrastructure initiative and is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government. It has been in operation since 2011 and over 280,000 people are on the register. Earlier work found that large numbers of members of the public are willing to allow their personal data to be used to identify them for potential research projects. Altruism, and also the hope that research may benefit either them or family members and their trust in the NHS that their data will be kept confidential, underpinned this.
After ten years of operation, the Chief Scientist Office would now like to hear what researchers working in Scotland think of SHARE, what their experiences of using it have been and what they want from a participant recruitment service such as SHARE in the future. The Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen has been selected and funded to run a qualitative study of researchers’ views of SHARE. The study is conducted independently of SHARE.
Contacts
- Shaun Treweek; streweek@mac.com