Milestone study securely links police and NHS data using Wessex SDE

The Department for Transport (DfT) has published ‘Linking police and health data on road collisions: an initial feasibility study’, which provides proof of concept for securely linking police collision data (STATS19) with ambulance service records – without using personal identifiers.

Scaled nationally, this approach could give policymakers a far more accurate picture of road traffic casualties, enable smarter allocation of health and transport resources, and ultimately prevent collisions before they happen, reducing burden on the NHS.

The study also shows the capabilities of secure data environments (SDEs). By using the Wessex SDE, researchers were able to accelerate the work from access to results in 13 weeks. SDE infrastructure enables secure cross-sector research, linking data to generate insights that improve public services while safeguarding confidentiality and trust.

This work forms part of the PRANA (Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network) registry, which links care pathway data on seriously ill and injured patients to accelerate research into emergency and pre-hospital care and disease prevention.

Dr Phil Hyde, Clinical Lead for PRANA, said:

“For the first time, we’ve shown that it is possible to securely link police road traffic and ambulance data, creating insights that can improve both road safety and NHS planning. This is proof that PRANA and the Wessex SDE can add real value by making research faster, safer, and more impactful. With the support of NHS England, we will now be able to add linkage of hospital outcome data – this will hugely increase the insights from each patient’s care pathway.”

The research was made possible by the Wessex Secure Data Environment, an NHS-approved system that allows researchers to study linked health and non-health data in a secure setting. All information is pseudonymised, so researchers never see confidential personal details.

Professor Chris Kipps, Senior Responsible Officer for the Wessex SDE, said:

“This is an important moment for us. It shows that we can make sensitive data work harder for the public good, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and governance. It is exactly the kind of responsible innovation that SDEs were created to deliver.”

The project was delivered with full approvals from the Health Research Authority and brought together DfT and NHS partners. It illustrates how secure data environments can act as trusted platforms for cross-sector research with tangible public benefit.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

• The research is published as ‘Linking police and health data on road collisions: an initial feasibility study (DfT, September 2025)’. Full results are available here: GOV.UK link.

• The work forms part of the Linking Police and Hospital Data on Road Casualties (LPHD) project, one of two road traffic collision projects funded by the Department for Transport using PRANA data within the NHS Wessex Secure Data Environment.

• PRANA (Pre-hospital Research and Audit Network) is collecting and linking care pathway data on seriously ill and injured patients from prevention, through ambulance and hospital care to disability/recovery. Applying the PRANA registry to road traffic collision research provides a huge opportunity to radically improve outcomes and prevent people becoming patients in the first place.