Research

PICANet has support and approval from the Health Research Authority Confidentiality Advisory Group to process confidential patient information without consent for both research purposes under Regulation 5 of the Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002 (’section 251 support’ of the NHS Act 2006) for data collected in England and Wales. The reference is 21/CAG/0098 and support is reviewed annually. Further details and assurances can be found in our Patient Privacy Notice and Fair Processing Statement.

The research database has ethical approval granted by the East Midlands – Derby Research Ethics Committee (ref. 18/EM/0267) and annual reports are provided to the committee.

The PICANet research database supports high quality research in the areas of paediatric intensive care, specific conditions affecting children and young people accessing paediatric intensive care services, epidemiology of critical illness and public health. Following a thorough data request process, and providing the appropriate research ethics approvals and legal bases for data processing and sharing are in place, baseline data can be provided for research studies and clinical trials to extend the available knowledge with a view to ultimately providing benefits to patients.

Details of data access requests fulfilled each year are included in the Annual Report Appendices.

PICANet also enables participating organisations to download their own data in format suitable for use within a specific research project through a customised data collection.

Information on some of the current projects PICANet is supporting is available here.

A summary of publications linked to PICANet data can be found here.