Dear Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust,

With regard to the following document:

http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/grou...

according to page iv (page 15 of the electronic document), your organisation (or organisations you commission) took part in this research. Please could you provide the following responses to my enquiries?

1) Were staff who were involved in caring for service users aware that they and their patients were participating in this research?

2) If the answer to question 1 is 'Yes', were patients made aware that they were participating in this research?

3) Were patients asked for their consent (I am aware that NIGB and Cambridgeshire ethics committee decided that patients' consent was not required) or given an opportunity to opt out?

4) If patients were not asked for their consent, would the following have prevented their automatic enrolment in the research:
a) PDS flag set to 'sensitive';
b) CRS flag set to 'dissent to sharing across organisational boundaries';
c) I assume all patients were asked for explicit consent for information to pass between separate organisations involved in their care, so therefore could you confirm those not consenting would not have been included in the research?

5) What other measures could patients adopt to prevent you or your providers automatically enrolling them in research in the future without their knowledge or consent, or passing their (anonymised or otherwise) information on?

6) If patients were not asked for their consent at the time, would a request under the Data Protection Act yield an accurate answer as to whether they were included in this research or not?

Yours faithfully,

Mr Rawlins

Dear Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust's handling of my FOI request 'Integrated Care Pilots'.

The questions I have asked relate to how your employees, or those employed by organisations you commission, have dealt with the issue of consent with the patients or service users they care for. Therefore, you are the most appropriate organisation to respond to my request, and the lead organisation would not have access to this information. If the provider organisation is still part of the NHS, then they would be more appropriate to respond, if you could let me know who they are. If they are a private organistion, then you are responsible for responding to this request.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/in...

Yours faithfully,

Mr Rawlins