Our 10-Year Health Plan for England sets out a reimagined service designed to tackle health inequalities in both access and outcomes. This includes tackling conditions where there are the greatest disparities for ethnic groups.

We remain committed to reducing the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest, an ambitious commitment that shows the Government is serious about tackling health inequalities and addressing the social determinants of health. Indicators to monitor progress in health inequalities are measured in key data outcomes, such as the life expectancy estimates for England and sub-national areas, produced by the Office for National Statistics.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed gaps in available data, including the quality of ethnicity data held to support the identification of health inequalities among ethnic minority communities.

There are a number of barriers to the consistent and accurate collection and recording of ethnicity data in the National Health Service, such as outdated ethnicity codes as a result of the need for the NHS to migrate from the 2001 to the 2021 Census ethnicity classification. There is also a need for a single point of collection of ethnicity data which multiple systems could speak to. Ethnicity needing to be recorded multiple times currently increases the likelihood of inconsistencies between data collected in different settings, as does inconsistency in how staff approach ethnicity data collection and recording, and there are particular challenges in some settings such as the ambulance services and accident and emergency. These inconsistencies can mean some individual patients having multiple ethnic codes from different settings and contacts with the healthcare system. In addition, the overuse of ‘Not stated’ and ‘Unknown’ ethnicity codes leads to gaps in data, undermining robust analysis of healthcare inequalities between ethnic groups

In October 2025, NHS England published an Ethnicity Recording Improvement Plan, which includes actions to address structural and practical barriers to high quality ethnicity recording at a system level, as well as guidance to support providers and systems to implement best practice ethnicity recording, including training staff and supporting patients to understand why and how this data is used. Data quality is a feature of the NHS Oversight Framework 2026/27 via inclusion of the data quality maturity index, meaning that NHS trusts are scored on the quality of their data overall. The completeness of their ethnicity data forms part of this overall index. Work is also underway within to address some of the barriers to high quality ethnicity data, including work to support the NHS’s migration to modernised ethnicity codes.

More generally, Department will look to improve data quality and timeliness, and fill data gaps around equalities in partnership with stakeholders.

Whilst it is possible, it is not mandatory for trusts to record second trimester miscarriage through the Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS). The requirements for the next iteration for the MSDS include more detailed data collection around pregnancy outcomes, including on miscarriage. Timescales for this next iteration are yet to be confirmed.

There are no specific plans to update the Digital Maternity Record Standard at present, as the current version has yet to be fully implemented by all maternity system suppliers. However, this will be considered as part of wider maternity data architecture design work, which will also support the MSDS and the Single Patient Record.

The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) is publicly accessible to patients on the Getting It Right First Time website.

The NCIP portal is a free data platform containing consultant and provider-level activity and outcomes data for over 500 procedures in 13 surgical specialties. It covers National Health Service practices, NHS funded work in the independent sector, and privately funded work carried out in the NHS. Over time, the ambition is to add independent sector data, to provide a single repository of whole practice. Currently, patients are not able to access this data.

NCIP allows consultants in 13 surgical specialties to access their individual outcomes data, for personal learning, clinical governance, and appraisals. NCIP does not record practising privileges in the independent sector.

NCIP is a critical part of the response to the Paterson Inquiry, which recommended that there should be a single repository of the whole practice of consultants across England. By sharing high-quality outcome data, consultants, their appraisers, and responsible officers can compare outcomes for their practice or use peer review to improve their performance in a way that is measurable and objective, leading to better safety and efficiency across the NHS.

Integrated care boards are responsible for assessing local need and commissioning services to best meet the needs of their local population, including determining how services are delivered locally to reduce the health inequalities. Therefore, staffing models may differ between areas to reflect local needs and existing provision. All staff within health and social care must have learning disability and autism training specific to their role as set out in the Health and Care Act 2022, which means that staff who see patients should be better able to meet the needs of people who have a learning disability.

We are committed to ensuring that, under the Reasonable Adjustment Digital Flag Information Standard 2025, all publicly funded health and social care service providers are able to share, read, and write reasonable adjustment data by 30 September 2026. The Information Standard is mandated across all publicly funded health and social care providers, commissioners, and IT suppliers. Should issues of non-compliance arise, commissioners of health and publicly funded social care services will be able to enact contractual sanctions at their discretion.

The Government continues to recognise the value of involving patients and family carers in decisions about the care of people with a learning disability. The Health and Care Act 2022 sets duties for involving carers in healthcare. Acute trusts are responsible for determining how best to involve family carers in the delivery of care, taking account of the needs of their patients and local circumstances. There are currently no plans to establish independent or statutory audits to monitor whether acute trusts are consistently involving family carers from admission to discharge. The Friends and Family Test is an important feedback tool that supports the fundamental principle that people who use National Health Services should have the opportunity to provide feedback on their experience.

NHS England has previously published guidance to support primary care to identify people with a learning disability, titled Improving identification of people with a learning disability: guidance for general practice. This information can be shared with other health providers if a patient gives their permission. The Summary Care Record is a national database that holds electronic records of important patient information such as current medication, allergies, and details of any previous bad reactions to medicines, created from general practice medical records. It can be seen and used by authorised staff involved in the patient's direct care, including in other organisations such as an acute trust, with the patient’s consent. We expect acute hospitals to have appropriate arrangements in place to record learning disability information, including through the use of SNOMED codes, which are mandated for use across the NHS including in acute trusts.

The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care better to improve outcomes for patients.

The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on the benefits realised from the NHS FDP, which is available at the NHS.UK website.

To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP.

NHS England operates robust procurement, governance, and information governance frameworks, with strong data processing and data protection terms embedded within associated third‑party contracts, to ensure that access to patient data is strictly controlled and only permitted where necessary for defined purposes.

NHS England remains a Controller for the NHS FDP, including acting as the Data Controller for the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT). NHS England and participating organisations each act as Controllers in respect of the data they contribute to and use within their own tenancies on the platform. Suppliers such as Palantir Technologies UK Ltd act solely as data processors, acting only on the instructions of the relevant Controller.

Access to identifiable patient data within the NDIT is restricted. It is granted on a role-based, purpose-specific, and time-limited basis. Access is subject to multiple layers of approval, auditing, and oversight. This includes director-level approval for administrative access, continuous monitoring and logging of activity, and formal governance through the NDIT Design and Governance Group.

NHS England has acknowledged that elements of the published NDIT Data Protection Impact Assessment did not fully reflect these operational arrangements, including wording that referred to NHS staff rather than authorised users and support staff more broadly.

The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information from different systems across the National Health Service into a single, secure environment. This allows staff to co-ordinate care better to improve outcomes for patients.

The NHS FDP is delivering for the NHS, helping people get the care they need quicker and more efficiently. Since March 2024, more than 100,000 additional patients have been supported to undergo procedures in theatres partly by increasing theatre utilisation. Nearly 94,000 people have been supported on their cancer journey, with 7% seeing a reduction in the time it took to diagnose their cancer. There has been a 14% decrease in delays discharging patients staying in hospital for more than seven days, freeing up beds for those who need them most. NHS England publishes quarterly information on the benefits realised from the FDP, which is available at the NHS.UK website.

To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP

NHS England’s contract for the NHS FDP includes clear data protection, confidentiality, and security requirements. These contract terms are based on Government Legal Department model terms and conditions, which provide robust provisions on data processing, including the enforcement of United Kingdom data protection laws and regulations. Suppliers such as Palantir Technologies UK Ltd act solely as data processors under NHS England’s instructions. Access to patient data is governed by contractual controls alongside technical safeguards, including role‑based access, approval processes, audit logging, and monitoring.

NHS England has acknowledged that elements of the published National Data Integration Tenant Data Protection Impact Assessment did not fully reflect these operational arrangements, including wording that referred to NHS staff rather than authorised users and support staff more broadly.

The Single Patient Record is a separate programme to the NHS FDP and still being designed. No decisions have been made as to how it will be delivered, or which suppliers will be involved.

The National Data Integration Tenant is NHS England’s secure platform for collecting and managing national health and care data. It replaces multiple legacy systems with one unified, secure process, reducing burden for National Health Service teams while ensuring the right data is available at the right time to support faster decisions and safer care. Data is pseudonymised using Privacy Enhancing Technologies and then routed to the National NHS Federated Data Platform where it is used for analysis, insights, and decision-making.

There are three Palantir contractors with administrative permissions under the instruction of NHS England as the data controller.

In addition, data engineering activities are carried out by twenty-two non-NHS England contractors, nineteen employed by Palantir or the supplier consortium, one employed by Mastek, and two by NHS trusts. They have limited project-based access under the instruction of NHS England. Individual access is strictly role‑based depending on the project and is time limited.

The NHS Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) safely connects information across the National Health Service into a single secure environment to allow staff to better co-ordinate care, through managing theatre time better, or improving the speed of a cancer diagnosis, or allowing the quicker discharge of a patient from hospital.

To date, 24 integrated care board clusters and 168 NHS trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP.

Information on how many NHS staff have declined to work on the NHS FDP is not collected centrally.

The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) is a platform that is available to 10,000 National Health Service clinicians in England, providing a single source of robust, nationally benchmarked data at an individual consultant level. Updated quarterly, it contains over 6,000 clinical metrics, including volumes, readmissions, revisions, length of stay, mortality, and is already being used for clinical improvement, appraisal, and revalidation of consultant surgeons in the NHS.

The platform seeks to support clinical oversight by giving medical directors, responsible officers, and specialty clinical leads access to the data for the consultants they are responsible for, supporting their statutory responsibilities for ensuring clinical quality and safety.

Once it is fully developed and embedded in clinical practice with the full support of clinical bodies, NCIP will consult with interested parties, including patient representatives, as to what is appropriate and informative for publication.

Detailed guidance for National Health Service organisations on Managing conflicts of interest in the NHS was issued in 2024. NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts must have regard to this guidance and comply with the Code of Governance for NHS provider trusts.

This states that board of directors should take action to identify and manage conflicts of interest and ensure that the influence of third parties does not compromise or override independent judgement. Directors must declare any business interests, or any connection with bodies contracting for NHS services. These declarations must be entered into a publicly available register.

Following an independent and transparent procurement exercise, in line with public contract regulations, the NHS Federated Data Platform and Associated Services (FDP-AS) contract was awarded to a consortium, led by Palantir, in November 2023.

The contract has a review point after the first three years, which is up coming in 2026, then after a further two, then annually for the remainder of the seven-year contract period.

Should NHS England consider future procurement activity beyond the current contract term, this would be undertaken in full accordance with public procurement law and with careful consideration of the criteria highlighted. This would include patient data protection, patient consent, transparency, public trust, alignment with National Health Service and wider United Kingdom public sector values and long‑term UK data sovereignty.

It was not expected that all trusts would adopt the platform by April 2026, and the NHS Federated Data (NHS FDP) programme is on track to support adoption of the NHS FDP to 85% of all National Health Service trusts by March 2026.

NHS England published its regular benefits and uptake data on 12 February 2026, which shows that at the end of January 2026 there were 110 NHS trusts live or in delivery of the Federated Data Platform. 167 trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, or 81% of the 205 providers of secondary and tertiary care in the NHS.

It was not expected that all trusts would adopt the platform by April 2026, and the NHS Federated Data (NHS FDP) programme is on track to support adoption of the NHS FDP to 85% of all National Health Service trusts by March 2026.

NHS England published its regular benefits and uptake data on 12 February 2026, which shows that at the end of January 2026 there were 110 NHS trusts live or in delivery of the Federated Data Platform. 167 trusts have signed up to the NHS FDP, or 81% of the 205 providers of secondary and tertiary care in the NHS.

The National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP), is commissioned, managed, and developed by the Health Quality Improvement Partnership on behalf of NHS England, the Welsh Government, and other devolved administrations.

The programme currently consists of over 30 national clinical audits, registries, and databases as well as five clinical outcome review programmes.

The audit and registry topics include, for example, the national vascular registry, the national emergency laparotomy audit, and multiple cancer topics, all of which monitor a variety of clinical metrics including surgical outcomes.

The role of the NCAPOP is to detect unwarranted clinical variation and to feed this back to National Health Service trusts in an agile manner. Timely feedback to trusts enables them to make quick improvements to clinical practice. The NCAPOP work programme achieves this by making trust data available in near real time dynamic dashboards. The NCAPOP audits also operate a statistically rigorous outlier process with the aim of detecting negative trust outcomes. Outlier information is provided to the trust concerned, NHS England, and the Care Quality Commission.

The dashboard and outlier data can be used by trusts to influence quality governance, improve patient safety and reduce patient harm, and enable tailored clinical quality improvement programmes.

The errors in the updated 2023 Learning from lives and deaths – people with a learning disability and autistic people report, which was produced by King’s College London, were found to be caused by an automated data-processing issue. This meant that some data on the causes of death was missing at the time of analysis. This affected the conclusions originally published. NHS England worked closely with King’s College London, to review the report, and a revised version has now been published on 27 January 2026.

NHS England has also worked with its data processor to correct the automated processing error so that it cannot recur. King’s College London has strengthened its data checking protocols to prevent similar issues in the future. The Department is assured that this issue has now been resolved and these improvements have been applied to the revised report.

As of 13 January 2026, the NHS England Federated Data Platform (NHS FDP) includes live instances and tenancies across 149 National Health Service organisations. The following table shows these organisations sorted by organisation type:

The organisations listed in the document attached have an active NHS FDP instance or tenancy and are operating within the platform in line with their respective data controller responsibilities and the NHS FDP governance framework.

The NHS Federated Data Platform, including the national instance, provides trusts and integrated care boards with a set of core capabilities and nationally commissioned locally developed products to support five key National Health Service priorities:

- Population Health and Person Insight;

- Care Coordination;

- Supply Chain;

- Vaccination and Immunisation; and

- Elective Recovery.

There are currently 28,732 active accounts on the Federated Data Platform's National tenant, and access to data is managed by dataset and product-specific access controls. This figure does not include the number of accounts across local tenants.

The information on the number of users currently able to access each purpose is not routinely collected, as user stats are aligned to products.