General Practice Transparency Notice

General Practice Transparency Notice for sharing Data for Planning and Research (Replacement for GPES)

NHS Digital collected patient data from general practices using a service called the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES), which has operated for over 10 years and now needs to be replaced.

Patient data collected from general practice is needed to support a wide variety of research and analysis to help run and improve health and care services. Whilst the data collected in other care settings such as hospitals is valuable in understanding and improving specific services, it is the patient data in general practice that helps us to understand whether the health and care system as a whole is working for patients.

In addition to replacing what GPES already does, the General Practice Data for Planning and Research service will also help to support the planning and commissioning of health and care services, the development of health and care policy, public health monitoring and interventions (including coronavirus (COVID-19) and enable many different areas of research.

For more information about this see the GP Practice Privacy Notice for General Practice Data for Planning and Research

 

OpenSAFELY Covid 19 – NHS England has been directed by the Government to establish and operate the OpenSAFELY service. This service provides a Trusted Research Environment that supports COVID-19 research and analysis.

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

Only researchers approved by NHS England are allowed to run these queries and they will not be able to access information that directly or indirectly identifies individuals.

More information about OpenSAFELY is available.