SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, DENTISTRY AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES

SITLESS STUDY PRIVACY NOTICE

Queen’s University Belfast (“we”, “us” and “our”) is committed to protecting your personal data. The notice is addressed to participants of the SITLESS study. This Privacy Notice tells you why we need to collect personal information about you, what we will do with it, and how we will look after it. It also tells you about your legal rights in relation to your Personal Data. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact us. Contact details are provided below.

WHO WE ARE

1. We are Queen’s University Belfast, a university with a reputation for excellence in education and research and a member of the Russell Group. Founded in 1845 as Queen's College Belfast, we became an independent university in 1908. The team are based in the Centre for Public Health at the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Science.

HOW YOUR PERSONAL DATA IS COLLECTED

2. Information you provide: When providing the assessment of outcomes as part of the SITLESS study, we will ask for information about you, such as your name, address, DOB etc. This is known as your “Personal Data”. We may also ask you for some special categories of information (for example health, physical activity and quality of life data). This is known as your “Sensitive Personal Data”

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

3. We use your Personal Data and Sensitive Personal Data in the following ways:

• Personal information and anonymised questionnaires are stored in a locked filling cabinet in a locked office within the Centre for Public Health.
• For those taking part in interviews or focus groups, audio recordings are used to transcribe anonymised data for the purposes of qualitative analysis. Once transcribed, the audio recordings are destroyed when transcription is complete.
• Anonymised data is entered into an online platform for the purposes of analysis.
• Personal data will be held for 5 years as per data protection regulations.

LEGAL BASIS FOR COLLECTING AND USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA

4. We will only use your Personal Data if we have valid reasons for doing so. These reasons are known as our “legal basis for processing”. In certain circumstances we may ask for your consent to process your information. At other times we may be required to process your information to enable us to fulfil our part of the contract we have with you. There are circumstances where we have a legitimate interest to process your personal data, for example to provide you with a service which you have requested. The legal basis for processing your Personal Data is:

• (a) Consent: the individual has given clear consent for you to process their personal data for a specific purpose.

When processing your ‘sensitive data’, we will do so in line with Article 9 of the GDPR and will use the appropriate exemption for each instance of sharing and/or processing, which is:

• (a) the data subject has given explicit consent to the processing of those personal data for one or more specified purposes, except where Union or Member State law provide that the prohibition referred to in paragraph 1 may not be lifted by the data subject;

WHO WE SHARE YOUR DATA WITH

5. In line with our Data Protection Policy and Procedures we can share your information, including Personal Data and Sensitive Personal Data, with the following parties for the purposes set out above:

• SITLESS European consortium partners - Fundacio Institut Catala de L’Envelliment, Barcelona, Spain (Project Co-ordinators), Fundació Blanquerna, Barcelona, Spain, Syddansk Universitet, Odense, Denmark, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany and University of Glasgow (only pseudonymised data will be shared for the purposes of analysis).
• This data will be moved to a locked and secure storage facility at Ulster University as the Chief Investigator (Prof Mark Tully) has taken up a Professorship in the School of Health Sciences at Ulster University.

DATA PROCESSING OUTSIDE EUROPE

6. We will not transfer your Personal Data and Sensitive Personal Data outside of the European Economic Area.

HOW LONG YOUR INFORMATION WILL BE KEPT

7. We will keep your Personal Data and Sensitive Personal Data for 5 years from the end of the study. We will only keep your information if we need it for one of the reasons described above. We place great importance on the security of the Personal Data that we hold, including the use of physical, technological and organisational measures to ensure your information is protected from unauthorised access and against unlawful processing, accidental loss, alteration, disclosure, destruction and damage.

YOUR RIGHTS

8. The Data Protection Act 2018 provides you with a number of legal rights in relation to your Personal Data, including the right:

• to request access to your Personal Data;
• to request correction of your Personal Data that is wrong or incomplete;
• to request erasure or the restriction of processing of your Personal Data;
• to request the transfer of your Personal Data in a structured; commonly used machine-readable format;
• not to be subject to automated decision making; and
• to withdraw your consent.

9. If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, or require further information about any of the rights, please telephone the Centre of Public Health, Queen’s University Belfast at  028 9024 5133.[RH3]

10. Where we need to collect your Personal Data, whether for the purposes of providing a service you have requested or under the terms of a contract we have with you, and you fail to provide that information when requested, we may not be able to provide the service or perform the contract. We may, therefore, have to cancel the contract or the service we provide to you but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

11. There may also be times where we cannot stop using your Personal Data when you ask us to, but we will tell you about this if you make a request.

CONTACTING US

12. If you have any questions or comments about this privacy notice, the University’s Data Protection Officer can be contacted at:

Derek Weir

Data Protection Officer

Registrar’s Office
Lanyon South
Queen’s University Belfast
University Road
BT7 1NN
info.compliance@qub.ac.uk   

COMPLAINTS

13. You have the right to complain about how we treat your Personal Data and Sensitive Personal Data to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The ICO can be contacted at:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

CHANGES TO THIS NOTICE

14. We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will notify you of the changes where we are required by law to do so.