The HDR Innovation Gateway Newsletter  

April 2023 

Welcome to the growing community of Gateway users accessing the UK’s unified platform to search, discover and request access to health data sets for research and innovation.

New to the Gateway?

MRC NSHD cohort metadata now published on the Gateway

The Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (MRC NSHD) is the oldest and longest running of the British birth cohort studies, starting in 1946 and continuing to this day. Data collected during this time includes information on maternity care, physical and cognitive function, socioeconomic circumstances and educational attainment.

The MRC NSHD cohort is managed by the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL and is part of the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration. 

The Gateway provides as a common entry point for users to discover and request access to UK health-related datasets. By listing information about each dataset (its metadata) the Gateway helps researchers and innovators to find data that could be useful for their research.

Missed our recent webinar? Recording now available 

Our focus was learning more about the data services and expertise on offer from two Health Data Research Hubs: Discover-NOW and PIONEER.

Out of our surveyed audience, only 9% had used the Hubs services before and 70% of attendees were joining a Data Access and Discovery webinar for the first time. We are excited to have reached and welcomed new audiences, and hope to see you again soon! 

In the meantime, the recording is available to watch via the button below and a written version of the Q&A session (including questions to answers that we didn't manage to cover during the live webinar) can be explored here. 

A data GOAL for the Alleviate Hub

The Alleviate Data Hub aims to make UK pain datasets Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reproducible, plus provide expert data engineering services that enhance responsible, timely and trustworthy access to pain data for research. 

The Hub recently hit an important milestone in its development by completing the data curation on the first dataset to be added to Alleviate: GOAL. 

The Genetics of Osteoarthritis and Lifestyle (GOAL) is a historical secondary-care cohort of people living with osteoarthritis. The study is now closed but the data generated can still support research today. Learn more in this blog post from the Alleviate team.  

Register for an account on the Gateway

Anyone can search and view datasets, Collections and other resources with or without an account, but signing up to the Gateway means you can also:

• Send enquiries and apply to access datasets
• Comment on Gateway resources, including datasets 
• Add your own resources like tools and data uses, and create and build Collections
• Apply to access advanced search methods like Cohort Discovery
  

Thanks for reading!

Missed our March update? Read this here. 

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