How to use freedom of information request data for nursing research

Nursing research often depends on organisational data relating to staffing, education, service provision and patient outcomes. While much of this information is held by healthcare and higher education organisations, it is rarely made publicly available. Surveys designed to fill this gap are time-consuming to administer and frequently suffer from low response rates, while interviews are not always well suited to generating the comparative data needed to examine national patterns or inform policy. Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation offers an underused but powerful alternative. In the UK, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 grants anyone the legal right to request recorded information held by public authorities1 including NHS Trusts and health education institutions. Similar legislation exists across approximately 80 countries including the Access to Information Act in Canada and the Right to Information Act in India.2 3 Despite this, fewer than 5% of FOI requests are estimated to come from the academic community4 and uptake among health researchers remains limited. This article explains how FOI requests work, why they are well-suited to nursing research questions, how to submit them effectively and describes their limitations (see Box 1). We use the UK legislation as the primary example though the process is similar in many other countries. Box 1 ### How to submit an effective FOI request