Updating Projects for Participant Withdrawal

This document explains how users can process participant withdrawal requests within the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform (RAP). It ensures compliance with UK Biobank policies and helps projects remain up-to-date with participant data withdrawals.

Overview

When a participant requests to withdraw from UK Biobank, RAP notifies project administrators. Administrators are responsible for updating their projects to remove withdrawn participant data.

The system provides:

• A withdrawal status indicator for each project.

• A 90-day grace period to process withdrawal requests.

• Automatic removal of data if the project is not updated within the grace period.

Key Terms

• Withdrawal Status: Shows whether your project data is up to date with the latest withdrawal requests.

• Grace Period (90 days): The window of time in which you can manually complete withdrawal updates. If you do not act, RAP will automatically remove affected files and databases after the grace period.

Process Flow

1. Pending withdrawal requests and the remaining days in the grace period will be indicated in the Data Withdrawal Column.

1. When a project admin user first time enters the project required withdrawal data update, they will see a Data Update prompt modal about the withdrawal request. The user will see the following messages. Please note, the date will vary based on your grace period.

   1. For Projects within the Grace period, this is the message that you will see:

b. For Projects at the end of the Grace period, this is the message that you will see:

1. User can choose to take the following two actions

   1. Cancel: Enter the project as usual.

      1. During the grace period, the users can still access files and databases containing withdrawn participant data.

      2. Once clicked, the notification prompt will be suppressed for 48 hours.

   2. Complete Updates: Enter the project and initiate the withdrawal process. The withdrawal process will remove the dispensed files and databases containing withdrawn participant data and replace them with the up-to-date ones.

      1. Upon the expiration of the grace period, if the user has not completed the update, RAP will remove dispensed files and databases containing withdrawn participant data automatically.

      2. Running jobs in the project may be impacted during the data updates

2. Users can also access the Data Update prompt modal from Project > Settings > Status > View Details

When in withdrawal in progress, the Status will be "Withdrawing"

Note: We highly recommend not to launch a large number of jobs and perform clone/copy operations on a large number of objects when withdrawal is in progress.

FAQ

1. What if I can update my project to a newer version of data, should I complete the withdrawal? No. If there is a newer version of data available, you should choose the data update (refresh), which will fulfill the withdrawal request along with the data update.

2. How will the withdrawal affect running jobs? Withdrawal will remove the files and databases containing withdrawn participant data. So if any running job is using these files or databases, the job will fail.