NHS: Databases
(asked on 29th May 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions he has had with NHS England about access to identifiable patient data within the National Data Integration Tenant for (a) Palantir staff and (b) other external contractors.
The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care to improve outcomes for patients.
The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need it most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on benefits realised from the FDP, which is available at the following link:
To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, including the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, the Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, and the Stockport NHS Foundation Trust.
Officials have been discussing with NHS England the arrangements in place for access to identifiable patient information for the purposes of responding to parliamentary questions and recent media enquiries.
The National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT) is a secure platform for collecting and managing national health and care data. It replaces multiple legacy systems with one unified, secure process, reducing burden for NHS teams while ensuring the right data is available at the right time to support faster decisions and safer care. Data is pseudonymised using Privacy Enhancing Technologies and then routed to the national NHS FDP where it is used for analysis, insights, and decision-making.
All access is governed by strong safeguards including encryption, role based access controls, and comprehensive audit trails. The suppliers of the NHS FDP and NDIT will only operate under limited project-based access under the instruction of NHS England. Individual access is strictly role based, depending on project, and is time limited. The NDIT and NHS FDP contracts have strict stipulations about confidentiality, and there is governance in place to monitor delivery and usage.