When we first started to work with Bath and North East Somerset Council through the Our Shared Future programme a number of our academic colleagues told us of previous issues they'd had in accessing local authority data and in using this data in their research. We then experienced this issue ourselves when a project we had initiated struggled to get off the ground due to data sharing challenges between the two organisations.
It became clear that we needed to work collaboratively with the council to establish data sharing and ethics agreements that aligned in order to reduce the challenges researchers and colleagues in the council experience in working together going forward.
Fortunately, colleagues at the University were already working on an update to our research ethics requirements, and as part of this they were taking the necessary steps of ensuring that our requirements met those of the NHS - ensuring we can work more effectively with the RUH and other NHS organisations going forward.
We took this opportunity to ensure that we could also align with the council's requirements, and that the council's ethics and data-sharing policies aligned with ours.
While this solves some of the issues that researchers will face in working with local authority data, there will still be challenges in ensuring data is collected in a way that is effective for the research questions that academics want to later ask of it. We are therefore now working with B&NES colleagues to influence their internal processes, and to try to establish a working culture of reaching out to the University for input at an early stage of projects to ensure that relevant data is collected to allow later evaluation work.
Streamlining our working processes between the university and the council will be an ongoing challenge and there will be no quick fixes, but through the Our Shared Future programme of work, we are looking to break down barriers to collaborative working as much as possible. If you feel there is something preventing your work with B&NES that you think we could address through this programme please don't hesitate to get in touch and we'll raise it to the Our Shared Future steering group.
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