Information for Participants

There are three stages of data collection which you may be involved with.

• Initial encounters which are the first point of contact between the complainant and the trust or Patient Client Council.
• Ongoing encounters are any future interactions between complainants and the trusts, these can be face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, or written correspondence.
• Participants’ reflection of their experience will be collected from diaries that we ask the participants to complete, and post-complaint interviews that will offer the opportunity for people to evaluate their complaints experience.

All participants will be anonymised and impossible to identify.

• Audio/video-recorded data will have names, dates, place names or any other identifying references removed, and voices changed.
• Using data anonymisation software, anonymising video recordings can involve turning them into animations or the blurring of faces.
• Data will be securely maintained so that it can be quickly located by the researcher, in the event of a participant requesting to withdraw from the study; or any other legal or ethical reason.
• All transcripts will be stripped of identifiers, and pseudonyms (for example – with names, addresses), or replacements (for example – with dates) will be applied.
• Any identifying details in the written communications (emails, letters) will be redacted.

Data is securely recorded, and securely stored.

• Unedited versions of the recordings will be encrypted and securely stored with only the core project team having access.
• The recordings will be digitally edited to ensure anonymity. Only anonymised versions will remain. This will become the data that is worked on by the researchers.
• At the end of study, all unedited data will be erased. No versions of the unedited, identifiable data will exist after this time.