"How long will it take to get data?" is a common question that is asked of Population Data BC (PopData). There is no simple answer to this question as it depends on many factors.

PopData has been working with Data Stewards to reduce wait times by:

Students enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program at a Canadian college or university,  or medical residents under training affiliated with a Canadian college or university, are eligible to access Population Data BC's (PopData) and Health Data Platform BC (HDPBC) data holdings in fulfillment of their academic or training program’s research requirements.

Expectations and responsibilities of the Researcher under the FIVE Safes model and the Research Data Access Framework (RDAF)

Through the Research Agreement and Data Preparation Agreement, the Researcher agrees to all conditions of use set by the public body or bodies that retain stewardship of the data, which may include (but are not limited to) the following:

The Five SAFEs model is an internationally recognized framework for evaluating access to privacy-sensitive data. The basic premise of the model is that data access requests are evaluated against a set of five ‘risk’ (or access) dimensions:

The data access considerations contained within the Research Data Access Framework (RDAF) build on data access documents from other local, national and international institutions, including the “Data Access Policy” that governed access to data from the BC Linked Health Database (BCLHD) from 1996 through 2009.

Population Data BC (PopData) holds population-wide, individual-level data to develop linkages among these data, and to support access to these data for approved research purposes.

PopData is authorized to receive, store, manage, manipulate and further disclose data through Information Sharing Agreements with data providers, as outlined in PopData’s Privacy Impact Assessment. PopData serves as a facilitating and coordinating third party for the creation of this resource for the research community.