Data research informs policy, practice, resourcing of services and so much of our daily lives.

Federation – the ability to share and access data between Trusted Research Environments (TREs) – can help to improve the volume and quality of research carried out. 

Developing this ability is crucial for research into some of society’s most complex challenges. But in order to trust research, we have to be able to trust the data it uses and the processes that researchers go through.

How can we ensure the same level of trust in the data, processes and research done across these different spaces?

The Standard Architecture for Trusted Research Environments (SATRE) gives TREs the ability to self-assess against a recognised community standard that fills gaps in existing accreditations. The latest update provides guidelines for what safe and effective federation across the system looks like, and has done so by putting public trust at the heart of its development. 

SATRE involved and engaged with members of the public throughout its development to find out what was important to them when it came to trusting the security of TREs, how the public should be involved in TREs and what they want TREs to communicate.

Members of the public were involved in different ways, including: 

  • A public contributor as an integral member of  the project team;
  • Collaboration Cafés: 5 Collaboration Cafés took place, developing the new version of SATRE. These looked at particular aspects including public benefit and governance. The SATRE Cafés attracted 306 participants, with 71 of those being public contributors;
  • Extensive consultation with TREvolution’s Public Advisory Group (PAG): A diverse group consisting of 10 members, alongside 2 Public Leads; 
  • In-person workshops with under-served communities: City As Lab delivered 4 workshops with 29 participants in October and November 2025.

Three of the people involved in ensuring public engagement and involvement guided the development of the SATRE specification detail their participation below.

Antony Chuter, Public Co-Lead for TREvolution

As data research and collection grow, the volume of data that can be made available for research continues to increase. This has led to the development of many TREs across the UK that enable secure access to different datasets.

What researchers need now is to be able to access data that sits across these different environments, while maintaining the high levels of security to keep personal data safe. This is tricky when TREs have developed different processes in isolation from each other.

SATRE makes this possible by providing a community standard that TREs can self-assess against. This only works because the community has been so influential in how this specification has been built. Many different stakeholders from across the system were involved in development, with members of the public playing a crucial role. 

My role spans across TREvolution and the different projects within it, but I initially came to this through my early involvement with SATRE. As a member of the SATRE core project team, I have advised on how to engage public members in the work of SATRE and clearly communicate the work of SATRE in stakeholder meetings and events such as Collaboration Cafés and conferences. Throughout my time on this project I advised on how feedback should be reviewed from the different engagement sessions and incorporated into the project from its early stages. My role places me at the centre of development work, acting as the main contact between the project team and the Public Advisory Group.

Kamil Sterniczuk, member of TREvolution’s Public Advisory Group

As a public contributor, my role in SATRE was not to provide technical expertise. It was to consider the specification from the perspective of someone whose health information might be held and used within a TRE. 

My involvement gave me a better understanding of the difficult balance between protecting sensitive information and enabling research that could improve health and care. It also provided an opportunity to question whether the wording was understandable, whether expectations around transparency were strong enough, and whether patients and the public would have a meaningful voice in how TREs operate.

Public involvement is important because trust cannot be created through technical security alone. People also want to know who is using their information, what research is being carried out, how decisions are made and what benefits the work is expected to bring. They need reassurance that public involvement is not simply a tick-box exercise.

Even when names and contact details are removed, misuse of health data can damage public confidence and raise serious questions about controls, accountability and how openly organisations communicate when something goes wrong.

Contributions from me and my fellow public advisers help keep questions visible during the development process. The updated SATRE specification says that public involvement should include people with different backgrounds and experiences. It also says that TREs holding personal data should make information about their operations and data-use projects publicly available, and that members of the public should be effectively involved in decision-making, advisory work or oversight.

For me, this is an important difference. Public involvement is now treated as a central part of operating and overseeing a TRE, rather than as an optional activity added at the end. The specification also recommends that incidents, near misses and the action taken in response should be shared publicly and promptly. SATRE may be a technical framework but the decisions it influences affect real people. Working with the public helps ensure that TREs are not only secure and efficient but also transparent, accountable and focused on research that delivers genuine public benefit.

Katie Oldfield, Senior Engagement Manager at Research Data Scotland

Every piece of input and feedback from members of the public was captured, collated by theme and discussed by the core project team. Through this process we discussed how to address concerns raised and include suggestions as well as identify what was out of scope. The draft which came out of these discussions then went through further development with the PAG and Collaboration Cafés. Public input alongside the rest of the TRE community led to clearer statements about audit trails, inclusion of statements on pricing models and output checking within TREs.

Not only was public involvement and engagement integral to the development of the SATRE specification, the importance of public involvement and engagement has carried through to the specification itself. The second version of SATRE released in July 2026 emphasised the importance of public involvement and engagement (PIE) in TREs and added guidance to support TREs in doing so.

Statements were included to ensure federations consider representative views across all the TREs involved considering geographical spread and the data held. Existing statements about PIE involvement were strengthened to be more actionable and to emphasise the need for public representation to be involved in a meaningful way. It was acknowledged the need to support TREs in carrying out PIE work and guidance from PEDRI was referenced to provide this. New and strengthened statements around transparency also reflected feedback from public members on the need for TREs to communicate their work clearly and in an accessible way, particularly when holding public data. 

The involvement of public contributors throughout the process has provided fair challenge to TRE operators and their input has strengthened the SATRE specification to help move federation towards being a trustworthy process. 

The integration of public involvement and engagement throughout the development of SATRE is a great example of how public contributors not only help to build trust in the work that’s being carried out, but also help to strengthen every part of the work itself.

More information

This latest iteration of SATRE was supported through the TREvolution Transformational Programme, funded as part of DARE UK phase 2. 

TREvolution is a programme of work shaping the future of sensitive data research in the UK by promoting shared standards and building trustworthy innovations to make research faster and more effective for the public good. SATRE is one of the areas of focus for TREvolution to build trust and accelerate research.