OpenSAFELY Data Sharing

NHS England has been directed by the government to establish and operate the OpenSAFELY COVID-19 Service and the OpenSAFELY Data Analytics 
Service. These services provide a secure environment that supports research, clinical audit, service evaluation and health surveillance for COVID-19 and 
other purposes. 

Each GP practice remains the controller of its own GP patient data but is required to let approved users run queries on pseudonymised patient data. This 
means identifiers are removed and replaced with a pseudonym. 

Only approved users are allowed to run these queries, and they will not be able to access information that directly or indirectly identifies individuals. 

OpenSAFELY is a secure analytics platform for electronic health records in the NHS, created to deliver urgent results during the global COVID-19 emergency. It is now being extended to other areas of research and population health

You can find additional information about OpenSAFELY at https://www.opensafely.org/   and  OpenSAFELY: About OpenSAFELY

Published on 15 December 2025