Data security

Legal Basis

BAJIR data is collected for a “medical purpose”, as defined in the 2006 National Health Service Act Section 251, for the provision of care and treatment and the management of health and social care services.

The data is collected on patients with a new diagnosis of a bone or joint infection in hospitals that are participating in using the registry with the approval of the Secretary of State under Section 251.   This approval is reviewed each year and approval sought for the following year. For patients entered into the registry we have 18 months to get their written permission to continue holding the data. After that all data about patients who haven’t given consent will be fully anonymised.

What happens to the data and who can see it?

The data are collected by the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff treating and managing the patient. Hospital computers are used to collect the information, which is collated, checked and approved before being uploaded to the BAJIR database.   Once the records have been loaded, they can be reviewed by authorised medical staff using an approved user account with a secure password.

When the data has been uploaded by the hospital or clinician, the software engineers and data analysts at Dendrite Clinical Systems will have access to data on a secure server in Dendrite’s offices. Some essential data will be cross checked with your hospitals patient administration system or HES data to ensure that we record all further operations on the same infected bone and joint, and to ensure we have medical status correctly recorded. Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) is a data warehouse containing details of all admissions, outpatient appointments and A&E attendances at NHS hospitals.

The software engineers at Dendrite will produce an annual report under the guidance of the BAJIR clinicians. The data will be analysed by Dendrite Clinical Systems under the guidance of BAJIR clinicians to produce BAJIR annual reports.   The reports do not contain the details of individual patients or their infection. They report results for groups of patients. These results may be broken down by region or hospital, and by other important information that may be related to outcomes such as age, general health problems and which type of treatment was employed.

The reports are likely to be used to help commissioners, providers and doctors understand the outcomes of treatment for bone and joint infections.

The data will not be shared with anyone, or used for purposes other than those agreed with the BAJIR steering committee. The data will be held indefinitely even when a patient is no longer undergoing treatment for their bone or joint infection as late recurrence is a common problem for these types of infections.

Further information

Queries should be directed to the BAJIR team at – nhc-tr.bajir@nhs.net 

The live BAJIR registry can be accessed here.