NIHR Research Support Service Hub and Specialist Centre for Social Care delivered by Lancaster University and Partners

Confidentiality statement

This document provides you with the information about how we, the NIHR Research Support Service (RSS) Hub and Specialist Centre for Social Care delivered by Lancaster University and Partners, from now on referred to as the RSS Hub, deal with the intellectual property that we are privy to whilst supporting your application development. Please consult the privacy statement for what information we collect and store about your project and how long we’ll hold it for.

As a recipient of support from the RSS, a national service consisting of eight Hubs from across England, the RSS Hub will have sight of your application and will be party to discussions regarding direction, scope, and intellectual property (IP) within your project.

All information that you provide us will be treated in the strictest confidence and only used to help us to give the best possible advice in the development of your application. Apart from RSS Hub members of staff, we will share your ideas and/or application, where appropriate, with our public contributors. All public contributors have been trained by the RSS Hub and have signed a confidentiality statement prior to taking up the role.

We may share your ideas and/or application with staff from the National RSS, to facilitate research support provision.  We will seek your consent before doing this.

On occasion, to provide you with the best support, we may need to consult an expert outside of the RSS Hub. If this situation arises, we will seek your consent before approaching them. Examples of trusted organisations that RSS Hub works with include, but are not limited to, other UK based universities, NHS Trust Research and Development Offices, Academic Health Sciences Network, NIHR Clinical Research Networks.

As part of working with the RSS Hub, you will be asked to share your final grant application with us before it is submitted for funding. This is for our own internal evaluation; it’s helpful to see whether our suggestions have been useful enough for you to use in your grant application and whether the grant is eventually funded.

Please note that the RSS Hub will take appropriate steps to ensure confidentiality of any information sent to us via email, although we cannot accept any liability for the loss or disclosure of data sent to us in this way.

Version 1.0 – 01/10/2023