7. How long will my information be stored for?

Key message: to comply with laws and other rules about research, we need to keep your identifiable information for a period of time after each study is over. The exact period of time for a study will be made clear in each study’s patient information sheet.

If you agree to take part in one of our studies, we will need to keep your information for a few years after the end of the study. The exact amount of time will depend on the study, but it will be made clear to you in the patient information sheet before you agree to take part.

Laws and other rules about research state that we have to keep the study information for a long time after the study has ended. The results of research can change how patients are treated in future. It is therefore very important that studies like ours are done correctly and produce reliable results. It is possible that, a few years after a study, the regulatory authorities or other authorised organisations will need to go back and check the results, so we need to keep the information to allow this to happen.

We will keep all information secure for all of the time we keep it. For practical reasons, it may be difficult to keep all the paper documents within the University of Leeds for that length of time, so we may ask a reputable archiving company to securely store paper documents for us away from the University.

At the end of this period of time, we will securely destroy your information.