Understanding Patient Data explores key moments in a person’s journey through the health system when they may be most open to learning about how data informs their care and how their data could support research.

This guide helps public involvement and engagement professionals and researchers to collaborate with the public and patients, valuing their lived experiences to co-create easy to understand information. This ensures everyone equally grasps the benefit of health data.

Research Data Scotland has gathered some introductory information on public sector data and how it is used in research, including information on how data is kept safe and made available for research.