Participant Information Sheet
Summary
The Mandala Consortium has been funded by Government to do research that will find out ways to make food healthier and more sustainable. To achieve this, we will work with local people and food businesses in the City of Birmingham to work out what changes to make that will help and support them to test out some of those changes. We will evaluate the impacts of the ‘interventions’ they make, and the process of delivering them.
One of the interventions being delivered as part of the project is change to the in-patient menus in the Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH), to reduce the amount of meat, and increase the amount of plants they contain, in an effort to lower the environmental impacts of the dishes.
We invite you to take part in an interview/focus group [delete as appropriate] as you work in or with the BCH Catering Team.
We hope you will find being involved in the research interesting and fulfilling. It will require some commitment of your time and we explain these commitments below.
Please take the time to read the following information carefully. Discuss it with colleagues, friends or relatives if you wish. Take time to decide whether or not you wish to take part. Thank you for taking the time to read this material and for your support for our research.
1. Why are we doing this research?
In this research, we aim to work out what needs to change in the food system to make it better - for people, for health and for the planet, and how this might happen. We are using the city of Birmingham as a case study, to test out some interventions to evaluate what impact they have on the food system, and how easy and effective they are to deliver. One of the interventions which we are evaluating is a change to the in-patient menu in Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
Food served in institutions such as schools and hospitals has been identified as an important route to improving the health and sustainability of our food system, through improving the sustainability of menus. There is limited knowledge on how to design and implement such menu changes in a hospital inpatient setting, or how to balance sustainability with the other outcomes hospitals must meet around maintaining satisfaction, safety, nutrition, cost and feasibility. The study will fill this gap through co-designing a menu change intervention with Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH) to improve the sustainability of its dishes, while still maintaining or improving nutritional quality, patient satisfaction and cost effectiveness, and evaluating the outcomes, process and economic impacts. The focus of the intervention is inpatient menus.
For the process evaluation, we want to find out if the menu change intervention was delivered in the way it was intended, and if not, identify any unintended consequences. We also want to explore the barriers and enablers of menu change in a hospital setting.
2. Why am I being asked to take part?
You are being asked to take part because you work in or alongside inpatient catering and will have first hand experience of how the menu changes have been delivered and received on-the-ground. By taking part in these research activities you will help to understand how the Hospital Menu change intervention has worked and how others can learn from it.
3. What will happen to me if I take part?
To conduct research we are required to obtain your consent using a form. We plan to use an online form (e-consent). If you give consent, you will be agreeing that you are happy to participate in the research activities described below, that you are happy with the way we will use your data and you are happy to be contacted by the research team to take part in these activities. In the consent form, we also ask whether you are happy for us to contact you at a later date to see if you are interested in taking part in further interviews/ focus groups / research relating to the study; this statement is optional.
Interviews
We will conduct one-to-one interviews and each interview will take place on Microsoft Teams, via the telephone or face to face and will last 45-60 minutes. Before taking part in an interview, you will have opportunity to speak with a researcher and ask questions.
Focus Groups
We will hold focus groups online or in person with participants. These focus groups will be used to understand group views on the Hospital Menu intervention. There will be approximately 3-6 participants together with members of the study team in each focus group. Our aim is to group people that work together in a similar role in the hospital. Each online or face to face focus group will last roughly 1 hour and will be held using Zoom or at a location convenient for you.
From the interviews or focus groups you take part in, we may use direct quotations about your participation in the study. These will only be used with explicit written permission from yourself, unless the quote is anonymised.
4. Possible benefits and disadvantages of taking part
What are the possible benefits of taking part?
Your valuable insights will help us to understand how the delivery of the intervention worked from the perspective of those on-the-ground, and identify the enablers and barriers to this type of action in a hospital catering setting.
What are the possible disadvantages and risks of taking part?
Taking part in this study will involve sacrificing some of your time, but we do not think there will be any other down sides.
5. More information about taking part
Do I have to take part?
No, it is entirely up to you to decide whether or not to take part. If you decide not to take part, we will completely respect your decision. If you decide to take part, we will ask you to consent via our electronic consent form.
You are free to withdraw at any time, without giving a reason.
Will I receive any payment for taking part?
You will receive a £20 shopping voucher as a thank you for taking part in the study.
What if there is a problem?
If you have a concern about any aspect of this research, you should ask to speak to the research team who will do their best to answer your questions. Please email hostess.study@ims.cam.ac.uk in the first instance. If you remain unhappy and wish to complain formally, the University of Cambridge complaints process is available to you through the University of Cambridge Clinical School Secretary: telephone: 01223 333543 or email: SchoolSec@medschl.cam.ac.uk
What will happen to information about me collected during the study?
Information we collect during the study will be kept strictly confidential.
The University of Cambridge is the sponsor for this study based in the United Kingdom.
How will we use information about you?
We will need to use information from you for this research project.
This information will include your:
Name
Date of birth
Contact details
People will use this information to do the research or to check your records to make sure that the research is being done properly. People who do not need to know who you are will not be able to see your name or contact details. Your data will have a code number instead.
The University of Cambridge is responsible for looking after your information. We will share your information related to this research project with the following types of organisations:
Collaborators from the Mandala Consortium.
We will keep all information about you safe and secure by:
Storing data securely on a secure computer network accessible only by the study team.
All data will be held confidentially on our Secure Research Drive (SRD) which is password protected and accessed by 2 Factor Authentication.
International transfers:
We may share or provide access to data about you outside the UK for research related purposes:
For additional analyses by other researchers
If this happens, we will only share the data that is needed. We will also make sure you can’t be identified from the data that is shared where possible. This may not be possible under certain circumstances – for instance, if you have a rare illness, it may still be possible to identify you. If your data is shared outside the UK, it will be with the following sorts of organisations:
Research organisations
We will make sure your data is protected. Anyone who accesses your data outside the UK must do what we tell them so that your data has a similar level of protection as it does under UK law.
We will make sure your data is safe outside the UK by doing the following:
Some of the countries your data will be shared with have an adequacy decision in place. This means that we know their laws offer a similar level of protection to data protection laws in the UK.
We use specific contracts approved for use in the UK which give personal data the same level of protection it has in the UK. For further details visit the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/international-transfers/
We do not allow those who access your data outside the UK to use it for anything other than what our written contract with them says.
We need other organisations to have appropriate security measures to protect your data which are consistent with the data security and confidentiality obligations we have. This includes having appropriate measures to protect your data against accidental loss and unauthorised access, use, changes or sharing.
We have procedures in place to deal with any suspected personal data breach. We will tell you and applicable regulators when there has been a breach of your personal data when this is legally required. For further details about UK breach reporting rules visit the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/report-a-breach
How will we use information about you after the study ends?
Once we have finished the study, we will keep some of the data so we can check the results. We will write our reports in a way that no-one can work out that you took part in the study.
We will keep your study data for a maximum of 20 years. The study data will then be fully anonymised and securely archived or destroyed.
What are your choices about how your information is used?
You can stop being part of the study at any time, without giving a reason, but we will keep information about you that we already have.
You have the right to ask us to access, remove, change or delete data we hold about you for the purposes of the study. You can also object to our processing of your data. We might not always be able to do this if it means we cannot use your data to do the research. If so, we will tell you why we cannot do this.
If you agree to take part in this study, you will have the option to take part in future research using your data saved from this study.
Where can you find out more about how your information is used?
You can find out more about how we use your information, including the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the UK:
by asking one of the research team
by sending an email to hostess.study@ims.cam.ac.uk
on the ‘How we use your personal information (for medical research participants)’ page on the University website
https://www.information-compliance.admin.cam.ac.uk/data-protection/medical-research-participant-data
Who else will see your data?
Interviews and focus groups will be transcribed by an external company under an appropriate confidentiality agreement and your data will be kept anonymous and later stored on the secure network drive at the MRC Epidemiology Unit.
Who is organising and funding the study?
This study is organised by the University of Cambridge.
The study is funded by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF) on Food System Transformation, which is administered by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (https://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/research/foodsystems-spf/).
Who has reviewed the study?
The study has been reviewed and approved by the Health Research Authority (HRA) UK, and the xxxxxx Research Ethics Committee (REC Ref: xxxxx).
Occasionally our studies may be monitored by our Sponsors. This is to ensure our research is conducted appropriately and in the best interests of the participants. Your research records may be made available for this purpose to inspectors from the University of Cambridge.
It has already been reviewed by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund (SPF) on Food System Transformation.
Thank you for taking the time to consider taking part in this research.
6. Contact for further information
If you have any questions regarding the research or how you might be involved, the researchers below can be contacted via hostess.study@ims.cam.ac.uk
Dr Kelly Parsons - Research Associate
Dr Alexia Sawyer - Research Associate
Prof Martin White - Chief Investigator, Programme Leader and MRC Investigator
