LPHD: Securely linking police and NHS road collision data

Delivering Public Benefit

This feasibility report is one of the first steps in supporting us as a sector to:

• See the whole patient journey, not just one part of care
• Identify patients missing from single datasets
• Improve the accuracy and completeness of health data
• Provide better evidence for prevention and treatment
• Support faster, more reliable research
• Help improve emergency and trauma care
• Inform better policy and service planning
• Make better use of existing NHS data.

Enabled by the Wessex SDE

LPHD provides proof of concept for PRANA 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.

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.