Last updated: August 2026 · Draft · Transparency notice.
In plain English
PCRA Caribbean — operated by Primary Care Research Alliance Ltd (“PCRA UK”) as part of the PCRA Group, which hosts this website — maintains a directory of Caribbean healthcare and research sites — hospitals, polyclinics, health centres, GP/family practices, private specialist clinics, physiotherapy clinics, diagnostics labs, dental clinics, pharmacies, and dedicated research units — so that research sponsors can find sites suited to a given study. To keep that directory accurate, we may periodically read information that sites have already published on their own public websites (site name, address, phone, office hours, named clinicians, specialty interests). We never read behind a login, never take data marked private, and never collect patient information.
If you run a site and would rather we didn't do this, scroll to How to opt your site out.
What we collect
- Site name, address, city, and country or territory (including any local postal code).
- Public contact details (phone, front-office email, website URL).
- Named physicians / clinicians and their public job titles.
- Published services, specialty interests, research involvement.
- The URL and HTTP status code we retrieved the page from, plus a timestamp — so we can show you exactly what we saw and when.
What we do not collect: patient data of any kind, data that requires logging in to access, data markednoindex / robots: noindex, any content behind a robots.txt disallow rule that applies to our user-agent.
Why we do it — and our lawful basis
Our purpose is to run an accurate research network directory so that sponsor-funded studies can reach the sites best placed to run them. We collect only information that sites have chosen to publish on their own public websites — the same pages already indexed by search engines — and we make opting out simple. We collect professional and business contact information only. For named individuals (e.g. a physician's name), we process only information the site has published in a professional capacity on the site's own website. We do not scrape personal accounts, social media, or consumer review sites.
This page is our transparency notice under Article 14 of the UK GDPR (information to be provided where personal data are not obtained from the data subject). Our lawful basis for this processing is legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) — running an accurate professional directory of research sites — supported by a documented balancing test, which is available on request. Member sites also operate under the applicable data-protection and health-research laws of their own country and territory (for example Jamaica's Data Protection Act 2020, Barbados' Data Protection Act 2019, Trinidad & Tobago's Data Protection Act, the Dominican Republic's Law 172-13, and the EU GDPR where territories such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin and French Guiana are involved), which apply in addition to the UK GDPR.
How we scrape responsibly
- We identify ourselves with the user-agent
PCRACaribbeanResearchBot/1.0and respectrobots.txtrules that target it or*. - We rate-limit ourselves to one request every few seconds per domain and back off on
429/5xxresponses. - We never bypass authentication, CAPTCHA, or paywalls.
- Pages are re-fetched no more than once per month per site in normal operation.
Who sees it
- PCRA Caribbean staff and admins — to curate and correct the directory.
- Research sponsors — a sponsor can see your entry only if they are matched to your therapeutic area for a specific study. Sponsors never see raw scraped snippets — they see curated fields we have reviewed.
- Service providers: the hosting providers that run our infrastructure. See our Privacy Notice for details.
Retention
We keep the latest scraped snapshot for the lifetime of the directory entry. Historical snapshots are discarded after 90 days. If we are asked to remove an entry, the live record is deleted immediately; the 90-day snapshot archive is purged within 30 days.
How to opt your site out
Any one of the following is enough. You do not have to do more than one.
- Email us at info@pcralliance.uk with the subject line “Please stop scraping [site name]”. We will remove the entry within 5 business days and add your domain to our block-list so we don't re-scrape it.
- Add a
robots.txtrule on your website:User-agent: PCRACaribbeanResearchBot Disallow: /
Our next crawl will honor this automatically.
Your choices
Under the UK GDPR you can ask us to:
- Tell you what we hold about your site (right of access).
- Correct anything we got wrong (rectification).
- Delete the entry (erasure).
- Stop any further collection from your site's website (objection to processing based on legitimate interests — we will stop unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds, which for directory data we do not expect to do).
- Restrict processing while we handle any of the above.
If the data-protection law of your own country or territory gives you additional rights over personal information, we will honor those too.
Questions and complaints
Email info@pcralliance.uk as the first point of contact. You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) — our lead authority — at ico.org.uk. Where the law of your own country or territory applies, you may also contact your local data-protection authority (for example the Office of the Information Commissioner in Jamaica, the Data Protection Commissioner in Barbados, or the CNIL for the French territories).
Changes to this policy
If we change how the scraper works in a way that affects the data we collect or who sees it, we will update this page and bump the version note at the top. Significant changes will also be announced on our news page.