For patients

UK-ROX is a national research study which aims to better understand if patients who are receiving oxygen as part of their Intensive Care treatment make a better recovery with slightly lower amounts of extra oxygen.

Nurses and doctors adjust the amount of oxygen given to patients based on how much oxygen is in their blood. At the moment, there is not much evidence about the best amount of extra oxygen that nurses and doctors should give during treatment. This means that different blood oxygen targets are used in different hospitals, but usually these targets will be around 96-97% of oxygen in the blood.

Some research suggests that giving slightly less extra oxygen during treatment may be beneficial, but more research is needed. We want to find out whether using a slightly lower blood oxygen target to guide treatment, might lead to better outcomes for patients when compared with the approach currently used in the NHS. Patients taking part in the study will continue to be monitored closely by their doctors and nurses. If the doctors or nurses feel it is in the patient’s best interest to change the amount of extra oxygen they are given, then they will do so.

This study is sponsored by The Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre (ICNARC), based in the UK, and they are the people who control the data that is collected and used for the study. This study (UK-ROX) is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research – Health Technology Assessment Programme.  The National Institute of Health and Care Research is an organisation that gives government funding for health and health related technology projects. To find out more about the National Institute for Health and Care Research, please visit their website.

To help us manage and meet the objectives of the study – ICNARC collects and holds personal data about you (and other participants). This information (such as your date of birth, NHS number, health data and contact details) was collected by the research/audit team at the hospital where you became involved in the study. This information was securely submitted to ICNARC. The research team will also collect information on your survival from your medical records until the end of the study.

Your private information is important to us, and we want to protect it from being seen by anyone who isn’t connected with the study. One of the ways we do this is by allocating each participant a unique code number, called a ‘trial number’. This means we can track your recovery specifically to you, without your personal information being seen by anyone outside the team. The term used for this process is ‘pseudonymised’.

The study has received approval under Section 251 of the National Health Service Act 2006 to process personal data for participants whom explicit consent was unable to be obtained. National Data Opt-Outs will be applied to participants in England that come under Section 251.

ICNARC will follow-up on your well-being by requesting some important health information, including survival and hospital stay data, from national databases held by NHS Digital and Digital Health and Care Wales, formerly NHS Wales Informatics Service (organisations that manages access to national database of NHS records). To obtain this important information, the UK-ROX trial team will send your date of birth, home postcode, NHS number and unique trial number (required to ensure you can be identified in the database correctly) to NHS Digital using a secure password protected online file exchange service. An authorised person from NHS Digital will then link the identifiers to the national records and securely send back the relevant data for storage on the secure UK-ROX trial database. The same process will be carried out with Digital Health and Care Wales.

We will also use these data to send a questionnaire on health and well-being to around 15% of participants 90 days after entry into the study. If you opt to receive the questionnaire by email, then we will send you a link to the questionnaire using SmartSurvey. SmartSurvey’s privacy policy can be found here.

All of the information is held in a secure password protected database, with access only by authorised research team members at your hospital and at ICNARC. Information collected during UK-ROX is stored on ICNARC’s secure servers which are owned by an authorised contractor called Exponential-e. ICNARC takes steps to ensure this information is not lost and makes regular back-ups of the data. ICNARC also contract Babble Cloud who provide external desktop and network managed services, including end user and infrastructure support. Employees at Babble Cloud will not access the data, however, they do have remote access to ICNARC servers.

Once the study is finished, statisticians from ICNARC will analyse the information to find out which treatment was most effective. A member of our team based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine will help with some of the analyses but will only have access to pseudonymised data and will not be able to identify any of the participants.

At the end of the study, ICNARC will keep identifiable information (personal data) about you for no longer than one year after the study has finished. The information will be then anonymised so that you can no longer be identified (unless you have agreed otherwise). It will not be possible to identify any person who has taken part in the study in any reports or articles.

ICNARC process data for this study under the legitimate interest legal basis. This is because ICNARC is a registered charity and the data processing described here is to support scientific and statistical research. Your rights to access, change or move your information are limited, as we need to manage your information in specific ways in order for the research to be reliable and accurate. If you decline participation or withdraw from the study, we will keep information on treatments and procedures that happened up to when you made your decision alongside minimal additional data for monitoring safety and important outcomes (unless you don’t wish us to). No identifiable information will be collected. There is no automated decision making or profiling.

If, when you consented to take part, you indicated that you did not want us to either obtain the above information from NHS Digital or Digital Health and Care Wales or to send you a questionnaire, we will not process your data for these purposes. As you were very unwell at the time, a relative, close friend or an independent consultee may have provided their opinion of your wishes, on your behalf. In either situation, you can opt out if you no longer wish that we process your data in these ways (contact details below).

More information about UK-ROX is available on this website. If you have any other questions or wish to opt out or withdraw, please contact:

Tasnin Shahid       Trial Manager                                     Tasnin.Shahid@icnarc.org                  020 7269 9277
Paul Mouncey       Joint-Chief Investigator                  Paul.Mouncey@icnarc.org                  020 7269 9277

ICNARC’s overarching privacy notice, and details of our Data Protection Officer, is available here.

If you have a complaint about our use of your information, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office via their website or write to them at:

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF