NHS has finally agreed to share GP patient data for research—this is why

The BMJ understands that NHS England will allow the data platform OpenSAFELY to share health data held in GPs’ systems this month, allowing researchers to analyse the data securely without seeing patient identifiable information.

Access to these national level data will help researchers understand more about treatments and patient outcomes. The data could provide crucial evidence on the most effective prescribing and lead to the discovery of new treatments for major conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and asthma.

NHS England first announced its plan in November 2023,1 expanding the agreement made during the covid pandemic with OpenSAFELY,2 an open source, secure analytics platform running across 95% of the population of England. The platform, a collaboration between the University of Oxford’s Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, the electronic health records group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and electronic health record software companies such as TPP and Emis, currently has rights to conduct research on GP data but only for pandemic related reasons.

The BMA and Royal College of General Practitioners are giving their final comments on the plans this week, with a public letter sent possibly by the end of the week. A legal direction would need to be issued to NHS England by the health and social care secretary, Wes Streeting, to extend the use of the OpenSAFELY system beyond covid-19 analyses, but this is a formality as long as the BMA and the RCGP agree.

“They’ve finally got the last bundle of paperwork to the Royal College of GPs, the Joint GP IT Committee [of the BMA and RCGP], and the BMA,” one insider told The …