Delivering for ADR Scotland: the story so far

Joining ADR Scotland: what’s our role? 

Founded by the Scottish Government in 2021, RDS was created to tackle some of the important challenges to faster, more efficient and safe access to current and wider Scottish public sector data for research in the public good.

Since April 2023, RDS has received additional funding from Scottish Government to specifically support the delivery of the ADR Scotland programme on practical data work around ingesting and updating data. RDS is working as a delivery body to support the scale up of research opportunities and speed up delivery of linkable ‘research ready’ datasets. This means making more data available, being used by more researchers, for more impactful outputs.

As an organisation our ongoing aim is to create a sustainable system of access to public sector data about people, places and businesses over the longer term.

While improvements have been made to the system in the past, RDS are fulfilling a strategic role that brings together all partner organisations who support researcher access. Working together in this way means that we can begin to bring greater efficiency to the system as a whole. Collaboration is going to be our most powerful tool for us to collectively deliver for Scotland.

What we’ve achieved so far 

While ambitions are high in terms of our ADR Scotland work, it was important to us that we started out by getting the basics right. This served us well, getting us into an operational space. We hired a fantastic team of data analysts, secured access to the data, and started working in ‘R’ so that the code was standardised across all datasets.

We’re working towards reproducibility and automation where possible. In the ADR Scotland data ingest process, our analysts have been developing a Reproducible Analytical Pipeline. By identifying key steps that are common across different datasets, such as cleaning, indexing, and reporting, code is written in R that can be re-used across other datasets with minimal human input. This improves efficiency and robustness and reduces the risk of errors. Investing time in setting this early on has been worthwhile, as it has resulted in significant reductions in the time taken to process datasets.

As we continue to process more and more datasets, we will continue to learn where improved reproducibility and scalability is possible. We’re also looking to the future and have started testing out our Reproducible Analytical Pipeline for automating low fidelity synthetic data — artificial data which contains no information about real people. I’ll be discussing more in my presentation ‘Exploring methods for generating synthetic data in Scotland’ if you’re attending IPDLN this week or you can read our Intro to Synthetic Data.

The aims of RDS and ADR Scotland are closely aligned and working with Scottish Government to deliver this has been a fantastic opportunity for learning and developing across the team.

When our partnership was announced as the winner of ADR UK’s Outstanding Teamwork Award back in June, how far we’ve come in that time really hit home.

Making progress on a project with such a scale as this can seem incremental at times, so it’s fantastic that the dedicated team of people working on this across both RDS and Scottish Government has been recognised.

What comes next? 

Now that we’ve established a solid foundation for our work on ADR Scotland, and have delivered new datasets that have been made available for research, we can progress with our work to both improve the current system, and to transform it for the future.

RDS have set up the Scottish Data for Research Alliance, formed of key partner organisations, to help improve the overall systems of accessing and processing administrative data ready for research in Scotland.

Improvements are being made to the way in which data is linked and stored will mean that health and non-health data can be more easily linked, making a wider range of datasets accessible to ADR. This methodology will be used for all datasets brought into the National Safe Haven regardless of the funding source, meaning that datasets funded through different sources will all benefit from each other.

RDS is developing a roadmap for how this system transformation can start to be realised over the next three years. There are a number of key strands to this work to enable a more joined up approach to data research in Scotland. This includes our Researcher Access Service, a new streamlined pathway that digitises the process for the first time, making it simpler to apply for Scottish public sector data for research. Working both within and outside of the ADR Scotland programme, Research Data Scotland are ideally placed to move, along with our partners, to a system-wide planning and prioritisation approach. It’s through these close working relationships that we can deliver on our mission of making it faster and simpler to access public sector data for research. I’m looking forward to seeing us collectively rise to the challenge.

You can learn more about our role in ADR Scotland in our work and impact pages, or for those attending IPDLN, come say hello at the ADR UK stand, where you can also chat to other colleagues working across ADR Scotland and the ADR UK Strategic Hub.

Want to connect with Research Data Scotland at IPDLN 2024?

Nora Cooke O’Dowd, Chief Data Officer at RDS, will be presenting Exploring methods for generating synthetic data in Scotland at the International Population Data Linkage Network Conference on Wednesday 18 September 2024.  
 
Katie Oldfield, Public Engagement Manager at RDS, will also be presenting at the conference on Involving the public in transforming the data landscape in Scotland on Tuesday 17 September. 

Interested in hearing more about our work at Research Data Scotland? Join our online Showcase Webinar on 2 October.