Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what NHS Digital does to ensure that requests for access to survey data are treated differently from requests to access patient and service use data.

NHS Digital has advised that it has data processor agreements in place with the UK Data Service so that archived survey datasets are made available to users registered with the UK Data Service under the Service’s safeguarded data terms and conditions.

Anonymised data may be placed in the public domain while pseudonymised data is released with appropriate controls in place through a data sharing agreement. Requests for online access or extracts of data held by NHS Digital are strictly controlled by the Data Access Request Service. This ensures that data are only shared where there is an appropriate legal basis, a purpose that benefits the health and social care system, and that appropriate security safeguards are in place.

The majority of NHS Digital survey datasets are disclosure controlled and then archived and made available for further research on the UK Data Service under end user licenses. Minimal NHS Digital resource is utilised to process applications for access to these archived survey datasets as they are managed in full by the UK Data Service.