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Milestone study securely links police and NHS 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.

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.

Wessex Pre-release Secure Data Environment (SDE) Launch

News

Wessex Secure Data Environment Pre-Release platform achieves key milestone in data security and research readiness

The Wessex Secure Data Environment (SDE) is pleased to announce the pre-release launch of its secure research platform, marking a significant step toward advancing health research in the Wessex region.

The Wessex SDE is an NHS-led platform that will provide an online environment for secure, privacy-protected access to health data. It will unlock the potential of NHS patient data to support research, create life-saving new treatments and medicines, and bring wider benefits to patients and our NHS.

The Pre-Release SDE launch marks the readiness of the technical platform to hold data, and assurance that it meets stringent data protection and security standards for handling NHS data.

The Pre-Release SDE platform will initially be accessible to a limited group of authorised researchers through a Platform as a Service’ (PaaS) model. Researchers will be required to obtain separate governance approvals to use the platform, including NHS Health Research Authority (HRA) consent or equivalent ethical and legal clearances.

Interim governance and quality oversight for the Pre-Release SDE is being provided by the Data Access Committee (DAC) at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, while a permanent governance framework is finalised.

During the Pre-Release SDE phase of operation the SDE team will finalise the operational governance model and undertake user testing. Adoption of a standalone governance framework and full release of the Wessex SDE is planned for end March 2025.

Wessex SDE Pre-Release Version

Milestone

The Wessex SDE is launching a pre-release platform to establish its secure technical infrastructure, built to the highest standards of safety and security of NHS data. During this phase we will finalise operational governance requirements with stakeholders and the public and undertake user testing.

The pre-release platform will be available to a selected group of approved researchers as ‘platform as a service’. To ensure appropriate use, researchers will be required to obtain suitable governance approvals, including NHS Health Research Authority consent or equivalent legal and ethical authorisations. Interim SDE governance and quality assurance is provided by the Data Access Committee at University Hospital Southampton.