South West Secure Data Environment

Our mission is to improve health outcomes through research. We do this by providing faster, fairer, safer access to linked health and care data for researchers.

South West SDE can support access to data from participating health and care providers across an area with a population of over 5 million people. This includes the integrated care regions of:

• Devon
• Somerset
• Cornwall and Isles of Scilly
• Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire
• Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire 
• Gloucestershire

Our SDE provides users with data from across different points of care to support a diverse set of research needs, as well as unique assets to conduct research into rural and coastal health and long-term conditions. The SDE can facilitate access to routinely collected health information, as well as rich data about particular patient groups.

Our SDE has expertise to support researchers from ideation, design, and feasibility through to data curation and research services. As well as access to curated datasets, we can develop bespoke linked assets, and support researchers and organisations to make their own research-ready datasets available to access safely and securely.

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

A secure Windows (Azure) VDI managed by South West SDE.

We are also developing options to access South West SDE curated datasets via workspaces with partner SDEs.

Included tools

VDI - Windows (Azure supported) | Git connectivity | Jupyter Notebook | Python | R Statistical Language and R Studio.

Optional tools

(May incur additional service charges)

Additional services can be deployed on demand within a workspace to support user requirements. South West SDE will also support access to other SDE workspaces.

Tools include:

• Azure Machine Learning, Databricks, SQL
• access to workspaces with preferred toolsets via partner SDEs

Additional platform services

These include:

• long term, secure storage to support regulatory submissions
• flexible computing power, including access to regional ultra-high-performance computing
• cost monitoring and capping

All requests for additional services are subject to SDE approval.

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

• data access application support
• grant application support and bid writing
• study design and feasibility advice
• patient and public review of projects
• access to clinical, scientific, and data expertise
   

We can provide curated published data sets from: 

• primary care
• secondary care
• demographics
• diagnostics
• mortality 
• prescribing

A number of data sets will be made available throughout 2025. These include: 

• social care
• mental health
• genomics
• community
• maternity
• vaccinations

In addition to curated datasets, we also offer:

• the option to request an unpublished, bespoke dataset
• hosting and access management services for dataset owners
• a bring your own data service
• synthetic datasets for training and reference

A full list of available datasets is published on the Health Data Research Gateway via the South West SDE Data Custodian page.

To find out more about South West SDE:

• email the team at [email protected]
• visit the South West Secure Data Environment website 

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