The Honest Broker Service is a function of Health and Social Care Northern Ireland. The HSC Business Services Organisation is the responsible organisation and provides a range of support services across Health and Social Care Northern Ireland. This includes the Regional Data Warehouse and IT support for a range of HSC IT Infrastructure.
The Honest Broker Service was established in 2014 and was commissioned by the Department of Health (then Department of Health Social Services and Public Safety).
The Honest Broker Service reports to the Honest Broker Service Governance Board, which is currently in the process of being re-formed into the Health and Social Care Data Access Committee.
The service reports and is commissioned by the Northern Ireland Trusted Research Environment Strategic Board. This board has been established to focus on development of data and connectivity infrastructure to enable collaborative data research and evaluation to improve our insights into health and social care.
We also collaborate and receive/have received funding from other research support organisations such as the NISRA Research Support Unit, Administrative Data Research Northern Ireland (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) and Health Data Research UK.
HSC Northern Ireland are part of the UK Health Data Research Alliance and we participate actively in four nation meetings and co-ordination around uses of data for research.
Memorandum of Understanding & Privacy Notice
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is the key governance document that underpins the service, all of the organisations within Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland as well as the Department of Health are signatories to this agreement.
It covers both the processes for researchers accessing data as well as the ability of the HSC family to access data via the service.
The MOU and privacy notice can be downloaded using the following links: