Wessex Secure Data Environment - Home Part of the NHS Research Secure Data Environment Network NHS

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Digital Critical Friends–led Website Improvements

News

Between June and September 2025, our Digital Critical Friends (DCFs) completed a review of SDE policies and public-facing information, highlighting a number of areas where transparency and accessibility could be strengthened. This work included detailed feedback on our SDE Transparency Policy and publication commitments.

In response to this feedback, we have completed a comprehensive refresh of the SDE website. The updates directly reflect the priorities raised by our DCFs and demonstrate our ongoing commitment to openness, accountability and public involvement.

What’s changed

Improved accessibility and clearer information

The website has been redesigned to better meet the needs of people with different levels of interest and understanding. It now provides clear, high-level information with the option to explore more detailed content for those who wish to learn more about the SDE and how it works.

Governance and public involvement

We have strengthened information about how the SDE is governed, including new profiles for core SDE staff and Data Access Committee (DAC) members. The website also explains the role of our Digital Critical Friends and how public voices are embedded in decision-making, reflecting our Better Together core value.

Accountability and raising concerns

A new section clearly sets out how anyone can raise questions or concerns about the SDE, both through our internal processes and via NHS routes.

Clearer and more inclusive communication

Content has been reviewed to improve clarity and accessibility, with greater use of multimedia to support different learning and literacy needs. We will continue to expand easy-read content where possible, while recognising the complexity of some aspects of SDE activity.

Improving the researcher experience

Alongside public-facing improvements, we have also enhanced support for researchers, including:

  • Dedicated pages for Data Capabilities and the Data Use Register, making it easier to understand what data is available and how it is being used.
  • Clearer guidance on data access and public expectations, helping researchers design studies that align with public priorities and deliver meaningful public benefit.

We will continue to work with our Digital Critical Friends and wider stakeholders to review and improve our website over time.

Health Data User Group launches cohort 2 of its User Advisory Group – sign up now! 

News

The Health Data User Group (HDUG) is delighted to share it is recruiting to cohort 2 of its User Advisory Group (UAG). Established in July 2025 as an extension to the Health Data User Group, cohort 2 will continue to enable the Programme to deliver technical service improvements across the network to meet evidenced needs of health data users.

 To support this, HDUG are looking to recruit participants for cohort 2 who are:

  • Intended end users of the network, including researchers, data scientists and data analysts who use code and analytical tools for research on a regular basis. HDUG are also looking for diversity in knowledge and activity regarding the Network and encourage those unfamiliar to apply.
  • Collectively representing cross-sector interests: including pharma, biopharma/SME, healthtech, charities, academia and NHS researchers to ensure HDUG can evidence the fullest suite of sector-wide interest.

HDUG are especially interested in current users of the SDEs with lived experience of using the environment.

Following recruitment, participants will be expected to partake in a virtual group every 6 weeks for 60 minutes commencing from Thursday 02 April 2026, 14:00-15:00. Ongoing sessions will be from 10-11am. This is an exciting voluntary role for up to six months.

Group members will be expected to primarily provide input on:

  • Initial user research findings to support prioritisation of new service features and functionality
  • Low-fidelity prototype solutions to support user interface design changes
  • Ensuring that our user research is carried out with the right people.

If you would like to become a member of this exciting forum, please complete the short registration form to register your interest. The second cohort of members will close 20 February 2026; however, the form will remain open to facilitate a rolling recruitment for future cohorts.

If you have any questions, please email data.healthresearch@nhs.net

Milestone study securely links police and NHS road collision data using Wessex SDE

Research Project

The Department for Transport (DfT) has published ‘Linking police and health data on road collisions: an initial feasibility study’, which provides proof of concept for securely linking police collision data (STATS19) with ambulance service records – without using personal identifiers.

Scaled nationally, this approach could give policymakers a far more accurate picture of road traffic casualties, enable smarter allocation of health and transport resources, and ultimately prevent collisions before they happen, reducing burden on the NHS.

The study also shows the capabilities of secure data environments (SDEs). By using the Wessex SDE, researchers were able to accelerate the work from access to results in 13 weeks. SDE infrastructure enables secure cross-sector research, linking data to generate insights that improve public services while safeguarding confidentiality and trust.

This work forms part of the PRANA (Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network) registry, which links care pathway data on seriously ill and injured patients to accelerate research into emergency and pre-hospital care and disease prevention.

The work was initially published in September 2025, and subsequently updated, in November 2025, to reflect developments in the linkage methodology which have improved the linkage rate.

Dr Phil Hyde, Clinical Lead for PRANA, said:

“For the first time, we’ve shown that it is possible to securely link police road traffic and ambulance data, creating insights that can improve both road safety and NHS planning. This is proof that PRANA and the Wessex SDE can add real value by making research faster, safer, and more impactful. With the support of NHS England, we will now be able to add linkage of hospital outcome data – this will hugely increase the insights from each patient’s care pathway.”

The research was made possible by the Wessex Secure Data Environment, an NHS-approved system that allows researchers to study linked health and non-health data in a secure setting. All information is pseudonymised, so researchers never see confidential personal details.

Professor Chris Kipps, Senior Responsible Officer for the Wessex SDE, said:

“This is an important moment for us. It shows that we can make sensitive data work harder for the public good, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and governance. It is exactly the kind of responsible innovation that SDEs were created to deliver.”

The project was delivered with full approvals from the Health Research Authority and brought together DfT and NHS partners. It illustrates how secure data environments can act as trusted platforms for cross-sector research with tangible public benefit.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

  • The research is published as ‘Linking police and health data on road collisions: an initial feasibility study (DfT, September 2025)’. Full results are available from: DfT link.
  • The work forms part of the Linking Police and Hospital Data on Road Casualties (LPHD) project, one of two road traffic collision projects funded by the Department for Transport using PRANA data within the NHS Wessex Secure Data Environment.
  • PRANA (Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network) is collecting and linking care pathway data on seriously ill and injured patients from prevention, through ambulance and hospital care to disability/recovery. Applying the PRANA registry to road traffic collision research provides a huge opportunity to radically improve outcomes and prevent people becoming patients in the first place.

£600m new funding to accelerate health research and delivery of the SDE Network

News
Illustration of a scientific research workspace featuring a computer displaying a chemical structure, microscope, lab books, a checklist on a clipboard, syringe, test tubes, flasks, post-it notes, glasses, and sample vials, all set against a blue background.

On Monday 7 April, the Prime Minister announced that the Government and the Wellcome Trust will invest up to £600 million to create a new Health Data Research Service. This groundbreaking initiative will deliver significant health benefits to the UK public and patients.  

The Health Data Research Service (HDRS) will transform access to NHS data by providing a single UK-wide access point to national-scale datasets. It will provide a national health data research service, building on work across the Data for Research and Development Programme, including the NHS Research SDE Network.   

Currently health data is held in a lot of different places, managed through different access processes. HDRS will streamline and simplify those processes through a “single front door” system where researchers make standardised requests to access data, making the system simpler and more efficient to accelerate the speed at which new treatments and services start to benefit patients.  

The SDE Network is already helping to converge more than 7,000 existing access points. Chris Kipps, Wessex SDE Lead and Professor of Clinical Neurology and Dementia at University Hospital Southampton said: 

“Working collaboratively with the SDE Network and the public, we have been establishing the vital groundwork to successfully deliver national ambitions that will benefit our local communities from health research and contribute to UK life sciences. We hugely welcome this announcement which will build on the work that the Wessex SDE is doing to improve research access to NHS data and thus accelerate key projects, such as our Pre-Hospital Research and Audit Network (PRANA), our Dementia Driver project and multiple cancer projects.” 

The Wessex SDE will continue to work with patients, the public, healthcare professionals and our external stakeholders to design and develop the service and will ensure that public trust is at the heart of our work. NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care are running a major national engagement programme on data—the first set of findings were published, collected from over 4000 people across England, in March 2025 here. We will continue engaging and involving the public and patients throughout the development of this service.  

We anticipate the NHSE team and Network to work together at pace over the next few months to co-design what this looks like in practice.   

Patient confidentiality will continue to be held to a gold standard with these changes – with robust security measures being in place, like anonymity and virtual locked rooms, to ensure no one’s health data is compromised.  

Professor James Batchelor, Wessex SDE Technical Lead and Fellow of Clinical Informatics and Healthcare Innovation at the University of Southampton, said: 

“Wessex is already home to EDGE, a world leading clinical management research system embedded into 90% of England’s NHS hospitals, with over 10m clinical research journeys. Combining this experience with the Wessex SDE will help us to unlock the power of NHS data while delivering the gold-standard security and privacy expected by our communities.” 

Details of the service governance will be shared in due course. We remain commited to codesign our governance with the public and key stakeholders including the SDE Network as well as the charities that have been involved as part of this community.  

The UK Government is partnering with Wellcome Trust as they are one of the largest, most prominent and respected philanthropic organisations in the UK and one of the largest medical research charities globally.   

Wellcome’s investment will support the UK Government to deliver the service more quickly but does not tie us to a specific design or delivery mode. 

Listening to Seldom-Heard Voices in Wessex

MilestoneNews
Close-up image of a large, diverse crowd of stylised wooden human figures painted in various colours, representing diversity and inclusion. The figures are grouped closely together, symbolising community, public participation, and collective voice.

The Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE) has published the final report detailing the outcomes of its extensive engagement with seldom-heard groups across Wessex, carried out between July 2023 and April 2024.

This work, crucial to embedding the voices of marginalised communities within NHS data research, offers clear direction to ensure the SDE operates inclusively and effectively.

Sandra Hall, one of our Digital Critical Friends and a key participant in reviewing this work, provided a foreword highlighting the importance of engaging seldom-heard communities:

“This report reflects the dedicated, meaningful, and inclusive approach taken by the Wessex SDE programme. It is not just a summary of findings; it is, I believe, a testament to genuine listening and committed co-design. I can personally say that these insights are actively guiding the governance, design, and strategic decisions of the Wessex SDE.

“Our collective goal remains clear: to build a SDE that safeguards NHS patient data while unlocking its immense potential to save lives, improve health outcomes, reduce inequalities, and accelerate vital medical research. The findings and recommendations set out in this report will help ensure that trust, transparency, inclusion, and accountability remain at the heart of this ambitious programme.

I encourage everyone in Wessex, particularly those from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, to get involved with the SDE – and with health research more widely. Your voice matters greatly – it is shaping how health data will serve our communities, today and in the future.”

The full engagement report, including Sandra’s foreword, is now available and will inform the ongoing development and governance of the Wessex SDE.

Read the full report: ‘Listening to Seldom-Head Groups across Wessex – June 2024’.

Wessex SDE enables world-first research featured on the BBC

News

We are pleased that the innovative Data Sustains Life project, led by the Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network (PRANA), has been featured by the BBC. This pioneering research seeks to link road crash data with health records to generate new insights into traffic collisions, with the aim of reducing severe injuries and fatalities on Britain’s roads.

The project, driven by the University Hospital Southampton and the Transport Research Laboratory, will bring together data from ambulances, hospitals, coroners, police, and government agencies across Thames Valley, Hampshire, and Dorset. By integrating these previously siloed datasets, researchers will be able to uncover patterns, identify risk factors, and propose evidence-based interventions that could help save lives.

The Wessex Secure Data Environment (Wessex SDE) is driving this project forward by securing vital data-sharing agreements, standardising data, and enabling secure linking across multiple sources. Our expertise ensures the data is prepared for seamless integration while maintaining strict privacy and security standards. While the research has not yet begun within the SDE, our groundwork is essential—laying the foundation for high-impact, data-driven insights that will shape future road safety research.

The BBC feature also highlights the project’s long-term potential to scale nationally, influencing both UK policy and global best practices in road safety. We are proud to contribute to the preparatory stages of this work, helping to lay the foundations for meaningful, data-driven research that could have a lasting impact on public safety.

Read the full article on the BBC website.

First dataset added to SDE will support improvements in treatment for bladder cancer

Milestone

The Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE) has successfully onboarded its first dataset, confirming it as fully operational for secure data handling.

The data onboarding milestone marks the second major milestone in the pre-release phase to demonstrate and test the Safe Data and Safe Projects principles. This is a crucial step for the full launch in early 2025, that will support advanced research to improve patient outcomes regionally.

It will provide a real-world demonstration of the SDE’s operational capability and readiness to support advanced research, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and governance.

The study will be looking at survival rates and treatments for a serious and aggressive form of bladder cancer, High-Risk Invasive Urothelial Bladder Carcinoma. It aims to improve the care pathway for patients to help identify the disease earlier, improve outcomes, and enable new research into diagnostics and treatments.

Further information about the research project can be found on our Your Data page, under governance and our News section on research – Bladder cancer case study.

First dataset proves operational capability of Wessex SDE Pre-Release

Governance

The Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE) has successfully onboarded its first dataset, confirming it as fully operational for secure data handling. This is a crucial step for the full launch in early 2025, that will support advanced research to improve patient outcomes regionally.

The dataset onboarded is for a bladder cancer study, ‘Describing Overall Survival and First-Line Treatment Patterns in High-Risk Invasive Urothelial Bladder Carcinoma Post-Resection Patients’, led by Professor Simon Crabb, Principal Investigator and Medical Oncologist at UHS. The project aims to improve the treatment of patients with high-risk invasive urothelial bladder cancer across Wessex who are being treated at UHS as the tertiary cancer centre for the region.

The data onboarding milestone provides real-world demonstration of the SDE’s operational capability and readiness to support advanced research, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and governance.

The onboarding of the initial dataset demonstrates critical technical processes, ensuring compliance with our legal and regulatory framework and the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) designed to uphold these standards.

Processes proven at the data onboarding milestone include securely transferring data into the SDE from external sources, applying robust de-identification processes, linking data across systems, validating its integrity and accessibility within the platform, and testing the SDE’s key safeguards, such as encryption, data airlock systems, and access controls.

This success builds on the launch of the Pre-release SDE platform in December 2024, which marked legal and regulatory assurance the technical platform meets stringent data protection and security standards for handling NHS data.

In line with the Pre-release SDE’s interim governance arrangements, the Bladder Cancer study has independently secured Health Research Authority approval.

Approval to move the dataset onto the SDE was given by the University Hospital Southampton (UHS) Data Access Committee, 3 September 2024, with data flowed into the Wessex SDE on 17 January 2024.

By bringing together different types of data, from multiple departments, in a single consistent dataset using the SDE, we will be able to analyse the ‘real world’ approaches to patient care taken by our clinical teams. In doing so, we will be able to benchmark our compliance with national gold standard treatment options to ensure that patients are receiving the best care possible.

In addition to highlighting options for immediate changes in patient care pathways, we anticipate that this will allow for new research hypotheses to be generated for future prospective research studies.

Further information about the research and public benefits can be found in our case study.

 

Survival and treatment for high-risk bladder cancer

Research Project

In line with the recommendations from our public panel, the SDE will provide transparency regarding the use of NHS data for research.

Our first research project to use the SDE platform will be a new bladder cancer dataset. This new dataset has been uploaded to the SDE, in line with our current interim governance arrangements, as shown in our milestone update. Details about the research and its ambitions are provided in the case study below.

The challenge

Bladder cancer affects approximately 10,000 in the UK every year. Clinical outcomes remain challenging, and improvements have been modest over many decades. However, improved understanding of the biology of the disease, and new experimental treatment options, have renewed optimism in recent years.

Local context

The Wessex SDE is excited to launch ‘Describing Overall Survival and First-Line Treatment Patterns in High-Risk Invasive Urothelial Bladder Carcinoma Post-Resection Patients’ as the first study to use the Pre-release SDE platform. Each year between 100-150 patients are treated at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS). UHS is active in multiple research projects to try to bring about improvements in patient care for bladder cancer.

Bladder cancer is a complex disease. Excellence in diagnosis and care needs multiple teams working together across nursing, urology, medical and clinical oncology, radiology and pathology. This results in very complex and diverse data records across multiple hospital systems that are time consuming to analyse and not well connected.

Delivering the research and benefits to patients

Details from 78 patients are being used in this study, using routinely collected historic data that has been de-identified before it is entered into the SDE.

By bringing together different types of data, from multiple departments, in a single consistent dataset using the SDE, we will be able to analyse the ‘real world’ approaches to patient care taken by our clinical teams. In doing so, we will be able to benchmark our compliance with national gold standard treatment options to ensure that patients are receiving the best care possible.

In addition to highlighting options for immediate changes in patient care pathways, we anticipate that this will allow for new research hypotheses to be generated for future prospective research studies.

Commenting on the milestone, Prof Simon Crabb, Principal Investigator and Medical Oncologist at UHS, said:

“Bladder cancer is a difficult disease to treat effectively, and it requires a cooperative approach across multiple medical specialties. By bringing together the information held at UHS, across complex data systems, we will be able to consider improvements to patient diagnostic and care pathways that we hope will improve on patient outcomes and patient experience. It is really exciting to see the SDE approach starting to unlock this potential which has previously been impossible to harness.”

Pre-release SDE governance authorisation

Governance

The SDE is now validated as a “Safe Setting” under the Five Safes framework when used as a platform-as-a-service. Approved research users must implement their own governance processes to ensure full compliance.

The Pre-release phase of the Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE) has been approved following a comprehensive evaluation process. The Clinical Informatics and Research Unit (CIRU) at the University of Southampton, our technical platform provider, has confirmed that the SDE complies with all relevant regulatory requirements and meets the highest standards of security and privacy for managing NHS data.

CIRU has also developed a robust set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure operational readiness and good governance. These have been thoroughly reviewed and validated by the SDE operations team. Based on these assurances, the Senior Responsible Officer has authorised the Pre-release phase, enabling structured testing to confirm the platform’s functionality.

Governance

All datasets and research projects using the Pre-release SDE as a platform-as-a-service must have separate valid governance approvals to do so, including NHS Health Research Authority (HRA) consent or equivalent ethical and legal clearances.

The Wessex SDE will use the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust’s (UHS) Data Access Committee (DAC) to check and validate these approvals, in line with its HRA authorisation.

This governance process will ensure compliance with the Five Safes principles of Safe People, Safe Data, and Safe Outputs, underpinned by robust SOPs and continuous monitoring.

Patient involvement and opt-out

The Wessex SDE puts patients and the public at the heart of decision making and ensures that public representatives are actively involved in the development and design of our SDE.

You can choose whether your de-identified patient data is made available to researchers by the Wessex Secure Data Environment.

Your choice will not affect your care. 

Donating your patient data ensures that researchers have more complete and representative information for research into new treatments and technologies.

If you’re happy with your information being used, you do not need to do anything.

Further information about your choices is available on the NHS website – your NHS data matters.

You can complete the national data opt out form on the NHS Digital website here.

The phone number for the national data opt out is 030 03 03 56 78 – Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm (excluding bank holidays).

Ongoing consideration is being given to a potential local opt-out option. This is being discussed with the NHS Research SDE Network, Health Research Authority and members of the public.