National Health Service (NHS) data

National Health Service (NHS) data#

Last modified: 18 Jul 2025

UK LLC is committed to four nation NHS coverage, i.e. England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Four nation linkage:

  • NHS England (DATA FLOWING): participants are linked to their English health records (where permissions are in place).

  • NHS Wales (LINKAGE APPROVED): SAIL Databank has approved the extraction of participants’ Welsh health records (where permissions are in place) - more details will follow in due course.

  • NHS Scotland (LINKAGE CONDITIONALLY APPROVED): NHS Scotland Public Benefit and Privacy Panel for Health and Social Care (HSC-PBPP) has conditionally approved the flow of data - more details will follow in due course.

  • NHS Northern Ireland (DISCUSSIONS ONGOING): negotiations are ongoing with Health & Social Care Northern Ireland (HSCNI) - more details will follow in due course.

See the Linkages guide for details of which Longitudinal Population Studies (LPS) have permitted linkage of their participants to the NHS England and NHS Wales datasets. We will add information about the NHS Scotland and NHS Northern Ireland datasets in due course.

Note: Even if an LPS permits linkage to an NHS dataset, the individual participants in that LPS can choose to opt out of UK LLC altogether or to opt out of all or a particular type of data linkage. If a participant opts out, no new data about them will be shared, but data that has already been provisioned can still be used until the project ends. Please see the UK LLC Privacy Notice for further information.

UK LLC documentation of NHS datasets#

We have organised our NHS data documentation by nation. Within each nation we have included (where the information is available to us) the following:

  • A summary of the datasets we hold for each nation.

  • A summary of the restrictions to use of the datasets.

  • A summary of the temporal coverage of the datasets.

  • An explanation of how LPS participants are linked to their health records and how they can opt out.

  • A summary of the various classification or coding systems used by each nation.

  • Multiple groupings guides that summarise the datasets that belong to the same domain, e.g. mental health datasets, hospital datasets.

  • Multiple individual guides that provide details about each of the datasets, e.g. NHS England’s Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Outpatients.

Contents