North West Secure Data Environment

The North West SDE’s ambition is to make a positive health and care impact with people in the North West through better use of their data.

The North West SDE is a collaboration covering a combined population of 7.4 million people. The collaboration includes the three integrated care systems in the North West of England:

• Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership  
• Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership 
• Lancashire and South Cumbria Health and Care Partnership 

This includes the two diverse cities, Liverpool and Manchester and surrounding areas, and the costal and rural communities of Lancashire and South Cumbria.

North West SDE is currently in a pilot phase and able to accept projects now that will start from September 2025 onwards.

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

Technical summary

Standard virtual machine (VM) sizes:

• 2 CPU | 8GB RAM (Standard_D2s_v5)
• 4 CPU | 16GB RAM (Standard_D4s_v5)
• 8 CPU | 32GB RAM (Standard_D8s_v5)
• 16 CPU | 64GB RAM (Standard_D16s_v5)

A range of others available on request, including GPU options.

Included tools

Windows 11 Enterprise with the following software installed:

SQL Server Management Studio | Visual Studio Code | R Project | R Studio | Python 3.11 | Anaconda 3 | Azure Data Studio | Azure Storage Explorer | Mozilla Firefox | Notepad++ | Azure CLI | Az Copy | Microsoft Power BI | Libre Office | Git | Java Runtime Environment | Juypiter Hub | R Tools | Package Mirror for Python and R packages

Optional tools

(May incur additional service charges)

Azure SQL Database | Azure Machine Learning | Gitea

Additional platform services

These include:

• cohort discovery 
• provision of a synthetic data set 
• data sets mapped to OMOP
• 'bring your own' tooling
• 'bring your own' code
• project archive 
• re-activation of archived data for re-analysis/follow up

All requests for additional services are subject to SDE approval.

We offer a range of consultancy services to support research project. These include:

• refresh/update data
• information governance (IG) consultancy service

With additional services to follow later such as:

• data analysis service
• research design

We can provide curated published data sets from: 

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

In addition to curated data sets, we also provide:

• national data sets
• local data sets held by integrated care boards (ICBs) across the North West, including primary care data
• 'bring your own' data service (publicly available/reference)
• 'bring your own' data service (identifiable/cohort)
• 'bring your own' unpublished, bespoke dataset
• federation with other members of the SDE networks’ data sets

A full list of available data sets is published on the HDR UK Health Data Gateway.

To find out more:

• email the team at [email protected]
• visit the North West SDE website

You can also follow us on social media – links available from our website.