Overview

You may have to address some or all of these issues, depending on your project. It will work best if you take them in the following order:

  1. First, you need to work out your general learning and teaching objectives in order to plan what recordings would best serve these purposes. This guidance is particularly concerned with recordings and images involving patients.
  2. Having decided exactly what sort of patient recordings would meet your objectives, you will need to plan how to either to create these or how to acquire pre-existing materials from other sources.
  3. You need to work out exactly how these recordings will be used and, in particular, who else might use them and for what sort of learning and teaching. If they are good, other people will want to use them as a resource.
  4. You then need to obtain patient consent. For new material this will involve asking the patient and documenting the result. You can only do this after carefully explaining to the patient what you wish to record and how the recordings will be used. For pre-existing material from elsewhere you will need to find out whether the original patient gave consent in a way that covers your intended use. Either way you will need to comply with data protection, privacy, and patient confidentiality obligations.
  5. To comply with rules of copyright, you will also need a licence to cover your intended use. In a clinical setting, even if you make the recordings yourself, you are unlikely to be the copyright holder. You will therefore need to explain carefully to the copyright holder which recordings you want to use and how they will be used. The holder of the copyright cannot give permission for any use for which the patient has not first given their patient consent.
  6. Finally you need to be aware of your ongoing obligations during storage, use and sharing of recordings, regardless of whether you have made the recordings yourself or are using pre-existing ones, and make sure that these obligations can be met. You need to make sure that you or others who might use these recordings act in a responsible manner and continue to treat those people who appear in the recordings with respect and dignity.

These five guidance tutorials will provide further information about what you need to do.