The GUARDS principles have been developed to act as an overarching governance framework for the population data research community.
For research using data about people to be legal, ethical, and publicly acceptable, there is a need for a research governance framework which is efficient, demonstrably robust, transparent and which balances the need to uphold individual rights and to minimise risks to individuals whilst enabling public good outcomes. Considerable work has been undertaken in the data governance space by many organisations around the UK. The GUARDS are designed to sit at a very high level and ‘knit together’ a wide spectrum of connected principles and requirements. The GUARDS act as an umbrella to help collate and promote this work, to provide a cohesive overview and to highlight areas where further focus, change and collaborative action is required in a spirit of continuous improvement across the community.
The principles act in synergy with the widely understood and accepted but more operational ‘Five Safes’ risk management framework, and we believe are best conceptualised and promoted together as the ‘safeGUARDS’ framework. The component parts of the GUARDS interact with wider principles: such as the FAIR principles for maximising the value of research data and the CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance. GUARDS is explicitly designed to acknowledge and respect these (and wider) principles and frameworks and not overlap with or seek to replace them.
The SafeGUARDS were developed by the Pan-UK Governance Steering group in partnership with the HDR UK voices network and HDR UK Public Advisory Board (PAB). The GUARDS have been through extensive consultation, with focused stakeholder workshops held with members of the Steering Group, and via a public consultation process which consisted of a survey co-developed with members of the HDR UK Public Advisory Board and issued to the HDR UK Voices network.
