News

My experience with UK LLC

10th Mar 2025

In this blog, UK LLC Citizen Panel member Salma talks about her experience as a public contributor. Please also read our other blogs in this mini-series from Jonathan, Sarah, Farheen, Alan and our Citizen Panel Lead, Dr Lidis Garbovan.

My Background

I have been a Born In Bradford Parent Governor (BIB) for over a decade.  I enjoy being part of the wider scientific community to promote public good and improve services.

The opportunity of being part of UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC) was shared with the parent governors by Born In Bradford and I eagerly jumped at the opportunity.  I joined with the hope to have an impact on promoting public good, improve the general wellbeing of citizens of UK and improve services. I believe that it is vital to unify data to create national research resources to improve education, healthcare and other services.  For example, I work in a primary school supporting children with autism.  There are different organisations involved to meet the needs of such children and increase their educational outcomes.  What I realised is that these organisations don’t communicate (lack of data linkage) with each other due to which contradictory strategies are given to follow, which are confusing.    

I would also like to improve the lives of women, especially women from a minority background and seldom-heard groups that suffer from poor mental health.  I myself am from a minority background and suffered from post-natal depression after my third child was born.  There is less mental health awareness in many cultures which makes it challenging for such women to find support.

Why I joined UK LLC 

I joined the UK LLC Citizen Panel because I enjoy being part of the wider scientific community.  My passion is to promote public good by improving services such as health care, social care and education.   

My experience with UK LLC

After joining the Steering Group we had several online meetings and were given introductions to UK LLC, its purpose and goals.  It consisted of talks by the team, professionals, reading materials and watching videos.  The information presented in a video format were catchy, engaging and gave me a better understanding of UK LLC, its purpose and processes.

The team of UK LLC, especially Lidis Garbovan, is fantastic.  Her style of communication, listening to feedback/suggestions and taking that on board is excellent.  A significant amount of information was presented in our first few meetings.  As a group we felt that the information presented was a little overwhelming and we needed more time to go through it and process it.  Some of the suggestions put forth by the panel were to have a pre-meeting read of information in order to prepare us for the meeting.  And for the materials shared in emails to be placed on a UK LLC microsite named ‘Panel Member Materials’ in order to make it easy for us to refer back to it when needed (for example, when reviewing the data access process). 

As a panel we explored the aims of the Citizen Panel, evaluated the data access process, data linkage etc.  We helped to shape the purpose of the panel, discussed how to define public good, suggested ways to recruit from diverse and seldom-heard groups and evaluated different induction materials. 

I would like to say a special thanks to my fellow panel member, Howard.  His style of communication: thinking out loud and breaking a topic into bite size pieces has been a great help.  I would also like to thank UK LLC for giving me the opportunity to be part of their team.