Five Safes
The “Five Safes” is a set of guidelines for accessing data in order to carry out research. It was originally developed by the Office of National Statistics in the UK. It is now being used to saefguard access data for use in research for new treatments, medcial technology or new ways of providing NHS care.
The guidelines are used to assess research before access to that data is allowed.
The "Five Safes" are:
- Safe People: for example a process to approve researchers
- Safe Projects: project proposal reviewed by a dedicated governance board
- Safe Settings: access to data is only through a Trusted Research Environment or other safe setting
- Safe Data: data supplied is deidentified to minimize identification of individuals (ie data is anonymised)
- Safe Output: analysis outputs checked by data custodians prior to release