Joining the General Dental Council Student Panel –
Your data, your privacy, your consent
The General Dental Council has commissioned us – Community Research – to run regular research with dental students. We are doing this by inviting dental students to become part of an ongoing research panel. This will involve us collecting information about you (by asking you questions about yourself), storing this data, and using it to recontact you.
Before you decide whether you want to be part of the student panel, we want you to understand what personal information we will ask for and how it might be used. We will then want to ask whether you consent to that (or not!).
At this point, we are collecting and storing your data for the purposes of inviting you to take part in future research activities. For each research activity, we will revisit how your data would be used, and ask you to give your consent to that. You will have full control at each stage over what you share and how that is held and used.
Types of data we collect and how it’s used
Here’s a summary of the types of data we will ask for when you join the panel, and how it will be used:
Your name – so we can identify you
Contact details: email address (and phone number) – so we can contact you to invite you to take part in specific studies
Some information about who you are, such as your age, nationality, ethnicity, and gender: so we can make sure we are inviting a diverse mix of people to take part in our studies
Information on your course, where you study and what stage you’re at: to make sure we have a mix of students and to make sure that you are only invited onto studies that are relevant to your circumstances
A snapshot of your views on a few specific aspects of dental training and dental regulation: at this stage, this is to give us a quick idea of your starting point on some of the issues we’ll be considering in future studies (your answers won’t be used to rule you into or out of future opportunities)
Your IP address: in order to identify and limit any fraudulent applications and to maintain the quality of our research
As well as using this information to invite you to join specific studies, there are two further ways we plan to use it:
Periodically, we may recontact you to update the information we hold on you, for example to check if you’re still a dental student
We will also be using data to give the General Dental Council an overview of the make-up of the dental student panel. This will be anonymised and generalised – nobody will be able to identify you as a member of the panel from this information.
Storing your data
We store information on secure servers hosted by Tresorit. You can read about Tresorit’s security here: https://tresorit.com/security. Personal data is always encrypted at rest and in transit. Only certain employees have access to the personal data you provide us and are only granted access for data analysis and quality control purposes.
We only store your data for as long as we need it for the purpose of running the panel – up until September 2029.
Your choices and rights
The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change email address, or you are aware that any of the other information we hold is inaccurate or out of date, please email us at: info@communityresearch.co.uk. You have the right to ask for a copy of the information Community Research holds about you.
Further data processing queries
If you wish to find more information – or what to do if you have feedback, queries or complaints – please visit our general privacy policy page: https://www.communityresearch.co.uk/privacy-policy