North East and North Cumbria Secure Data Environment

The NENC SDE is dedicated to revolutionising data accessibility for researchers by streamlining the process, within a safe and controlled environment. By offering a single access point and simplifying the existing governance complexities, the NENC SDE aims to make data utilisation more efficient, thereby accelerating research, development and innovation.

Our objective is to unlock the full potential of our regional data, transforming it into a powerful asset that underpins improvements in health and social care. Through the integration of linked datasets spanning primary, secondary, and other care sectors, as well as non-care related datasets, we aspire to provide comprehensive, population-level insights that inform research and development that has a real impact on services and the public.

The diverse and stable demographic of the NENC region, coupled with the high prevalence of common health conditions, offers an ideal test bed for pioneering health solutions. By facilitating a faster transition from proof of concept to widespread adoption, the NENC SDE is committed to improving the health outcomes of our population.

Our demographic information covers the North East and North Cumbria region of England including the areas of:

• County Durham
• Gateshead
• Newcastle
• North Cumbria
• North Tyneside
• Northumberland
• South Tyneside
• Sunderland
• Tees Valley (which includes Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Stockton-on-Tees)

In total, we have a population of 3.1 million people.

NENC SDE is governed by the NHS North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board.

The information below provides a summary of the services provided to researchers by NENC SDE. Contact us if you have a specific requirement not explicitly identified below - we will be delighted to discuss how we can best support you.

A secure workspace within the SDE will be implemented for each project. The standard package for a secure workspace includes a cloud-based VDI providing access to an instance of the platform, a suite of included tools, and support capabilities.

Technical summary

Secure  Windows (Azure) VDI

Standard 4 v cores and 32GB of memory

Included tools

Office 365 (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote) | Power BI desktop | SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) | Azure Data Studio | RStudio | R Statistical Language | Git based repository and Tortoise Git | Nexus Repository Manager | Python | VDI - Windows (Azure supported) | Visual Studio (VS) Code | Pandoc | Jupyter Notebook | Conda | Mamba | OpenStreetMap tile server | dbt core

Optional tools

(May incur additional service charges)

Azure Data Factory (ADF) | Azure Machine Learning (ML) | Stata | Databricks | MySQL | Scala | PostgreSQL | Docker | PERL | Synapse

Additional platform services

1. Submit a request for a third-party tool that is not part of the secure workspace standard package.
2. Bring Your Own Code : Users have the ability to request to bring their own code to be used within the Secure Workspace.
3. Computing Power Review / Increase : Increased compute power to suit your needs.

All requests for additional services are subject to SDE approval.

We offer a range of consultancy services to support research project. These include, but are not limited to:

Bid writing | Clinical support and expertise | Clinical trial support | Communications and marketing | Contracting and legal | Data access application support | Data analyst | Feasibility | Health implementation | IG support | Market research and horizon scanning | PPIE | Project support and management | Real world evaluation | Regulatory support | Retrospective studies

We can provide curated published datasets from:

• primary care
• secondary care
• prescribing
• diagnostics
• community
• mental health
• mortality
• maternity
• demographics
• genomics
• social care
• vaccinations

In addition to curated datasets, we also offer additional data services. These include, but are not limited to:

• 'bring your own data' (publicly available/reference)
• 'bring your own data' (identifiable/cohort)
• pseudo at source capability to flow provider data 
• request for an unpublished, bespoke dataset

A full list of available datasets will be published shortly on the HDR UK Health Data Gateway.

For projects interested in using the secure data environment:

• email the team at [email protected] to discuss costs and feasibility
• visit the North East and North Cumbria SDE website