Cohort Resources Facility – Scoping Study

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) are collaborating to establish a Cohort Resources Facility which will promote and showcase the UK’s world leading portfolio of cohort studies and provide a dedicated resource for all cohort studies through the sharing of best practice and the development of new practices in a variety of areas. If you have any comments or suggestions we would like to hear from you.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Medical Research Council (MRC) are collaborating to establish a Cohort Resources Facility which will promote and showcase the UK’s world leading portfolio of cohort studies and provide a dedicated resource for all cohort studies through the sharing of best practice and the development of new practices in a variety of areas.

It is planned that the Cohort Resources Facility will: encourage cross-cohort research; improve knowledge about and access to data in these cohort resources; provide “best practice” guidance for governance arrangements regarding biological specimens, sharing data, security policies and ethical safeguards; address training and capacity building needs; assist cohort teams with academic and policy engagement strategies; and encourage adoption of agreed standards for data preservation.

To help with the planning of this Facility a team led by CLS have been asked to carry out a Scoping Study to review existing and developing practices across a range of major cohort studies and to gather views from those involved in cohort based research on suggested priorities for the new Facility and potential roles it could play in overcoming current problems and challenges.

We are seeking the views of cohort study leadership teams, cohort study data users, data service providers and any others with an interest in this area.

More information about the Scoping Study is available here: www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/scoping.
The Scoping Study is your opportunity to help us ensure that the new Facility is as useful and effective as possible.  If you have any comments or suggestions we would like to hear from you.

The website above includes a link to a short web-survey or you can simply email us your thoughts: crfscoping@ioe.ac.uk