Secure Data Environment (SDE)

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Supporting a Secure Data Environment in the South West

Project
overview

Secure Data Environments (SDEs) aim to create safe, secure, central points of access for data for research, creating new opportunities for research that can improve healthcare outcomes.
Due to launch in summer 2025, the South West SDE will cover Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire; Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly; Devon; Gloucestershire; Somerset; Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire; and the South Western Ambulance Service area, including Dorset.
A successful business case from the Partnership has secured an initial £1.8m to support development of a SDE in the South West, with a further £2.3m committed for the following year.

Partners involved

All eight PRIP partners worked with NHS organisations and academia across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and the wider South West to create a business case that was submitted to NHS England, outlining how the region would approach the programme, as well as demonstrating why it is important that the South West should be represented in research through a SDE.
In total, participating partners include six integrated care boards, two Biomedical Research Centres, two Health Innovation Network organisations, two ARCS, SWASFT and supporting universities.
Health Innovation South West helped play a convener role across the participating organisations.

Project
detail

The Department of Health and Social Care’s “Data Saves Lives” policy describes how the NHS should improve access to data for research. Currently, the process can be complicated, meaning that potentially life-saving research is not able to be carried out.

SDEs aim to overcome this challenge, by developing safe, secure, central points of access for data for research. SDEs would allow lots of different data sources to be joined together, creating a much more accurate picture of how health and care is delivered. This creates new opportunities for research that can improve healthcare.

Leveraging our collective research and innovation assets, the Partnership has secured external funding and investment to maximise the value of this opportunity for our region.

Following a successful business case, the Partnership helped the system create the right conditions for the programme to start well, collectively designing a model for a SDE. We have co-developed a vision that sees the South West as an innovative place for research that brings academia and health systems closer together, that can ultimately drive better patient care.

We will continue to test this model over the next 12 months, before considering how best to take its learnings into a fully operational secure data environment, that can ensure data can be accessed for life saving research in the safest way possible.

Currently, members of the public sit in our governance and programme teams as integral parts of the design process and a series of workshops have gathered feedback from people in the South West. Over the next year, public involvement will be increased even more and include large scale communications across the geography.

Impact from this work

An initial £1.8m has been secured to deliver the programme, with a further £2.3m committed for the following year, and achieved the following gals to create the foundations for the programme:

Information Governance and Ethics: Supported an application to the health research authority alongside colleagues in University of Bristol, to receive ethics approval and establish a clear legal basis for the SDE.
Technology and security: Supported an options appraisal to propose an initial technical model to be delivered over the next 12 months.
Research: Supported the development of a pipeline of high-impact research to conduct via the SDE once it is live, including agreeing the initial two test cases exploring improving flow through acute and community settings.
Public Engagement and Communications: Supported a significant number of professional engagement activities reaching over 300 people. This included working with PenARC, who led the establishment of a new professional network (South West Analytics and Infrastructure in Healthcare). University of the West of England led on a series of public engagement workshops attended by 87 people to gather initial feedback, that is being used to design a full public communications campaign.
Through the programme, we have also helped create a collaboration of secure data environments in the South West, ensuring learning can be shared to help reduce duplication and lead to a more efficient use of public resource.

In the long term, SDEs intend to provide the following benefits:

Security and peace of mind. SDEs are developed to the highest security standards. Only approved researchers, working on pre-approved projects, will be able to access the data.
Speeding up the research process. The SDE will make data-sharing processes more efficient. Researchers will be able to access data in one place. They won’t have to ask lots of organisations for permission or set up separate data sharing agreements. This will speed up research, bringing new treatments and approaches into practice more quickly.
Improving the diversity of people included in research. SDEs pool information across the whole population. Historically, research study participants have mostly been white and middle class. This means findings won’t always apply to everyone. The SDE will enable studies to focus on groups that don’t normally get included in research.
Enabling more researchers to help solve problems in health and social care. Through improving support, processes and technology, more research can be undertaken. This could include understanding demand for emergency or social care. Or it might be on the effectiveness of treatments or developing new clinical risk scores.