A new system for GP data

NHS Digital recently announced a new system for collecting data from GP practices, which is called General Practice Data for Planning and Research (GPDPR).  

You can find out what this change means in more detail on the NHS Digital website, where you can also find out your options for opting out.

Our Medical Director, Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, said:

“As we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, using anonymised patient information for medical research saves lives, by helping researchers find out which treatments work best. Using different types of NHS patient data linked together has already helped to make enormously important discoveries in fighting heart disease and many other illnesses.

“Bringing our anonymised GP health data together with the rest of our medical data in an appropriately careful, controlled and secure way will mean that researchers are able to ask bigger, better questions and make bigger, better advances to make our lives and the lives of future generations healthier.

“But it’s really important that questions the public may have around the use of their data are answered in an open and honest way and that people can make an informed choice and feel confident about the benefits of this process.”

find out more about how researchers are using data