The Five Safes Framework for TREs

Explaining the Five Saves Framework and how our TRE adheres to these best practices.

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Diagram showing the Five Safes Framework of: Safe data, Safe projects, Safe people, Safe settings, and Safe outputs

The Five Safes Framework are best practices that allow us, as TRE providers, to maintain trust and transparency in managing data. We apply proportionate risk mitigation, including the use of our TRE.​

  1. Safe People can access the TRE after training, approvals, and our data user declaration are in place. ​

  2. Safe Projects are reviewed for potential patient and public benefit. Contractual agreements may be required where an external 3rd party is involved.​

  3. Safe Settings (Our TRE) is used to access the data on secure technology systems.​

  4. Safe Data Data is pseudonymised to protect privacy, data minimisation and impact assessments are used to mitigate risk.​

  5. Safe Outputs Only summary data can be taken out of the TRE, after disclosure control to ensure no sensitive data is released. This includes AI/ML models after questionnaire completion and attack report.​

You can read more generally about the Five Safes at Research Data Scotland.

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