NHS: Databases
(asked on 1st June 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of whether the governance framework for the NHS Federated Data Platform reflects the data access arrangements currently in operation.
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 better 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 them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on the benefits realised from the NHS 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 Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
The NHS FDP is underpinned by the NHS FDP Information Governance Framework which sets out the roles, responsibilities, and controls governing how data is accessed and used.
Access to data within the platform is subject to role-based and purpose-based access controls and is governed through a comprehensive set of information governance documentation, including Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA), data sharing agreements, and privacy notices.
Each product and use case within the platform is required to undergo appropriate information governance assessment and approval processes prior to deployment, with oversight provided through established governance arrangements, including the Federated Data Platform Data Governance Group.
NHS England has undertaken an urgent review of the current DPIA for the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT), as the description of access to the directly identifiable layer within NDIT could be interpreted as indicating that non-NHS England staff have no access. This will be revised to make clear that some supplier staff, appropriately controlled, have access to patient data.