Linking Police and Health Data on Road Collisions

The road safety statistics team manages the collection and publication of data and statistics on road collisions as reported by the police. The team have a requirement to address gaps in the completeness and coverage of the police reported data by linking it to data available from various healthcare datasets, including those managed by NHS England.

In order to deliver this requirement, a supplier would need to have the necessary approvals in place, in particular the permission to use confidential patient information without consent known as Section 251 approval (under section 251 of the 2006 NHS Act). This is necessary for the requirement, for example to link the datasets as far as is reasonably practicable.

The process to obtain Section 251 approval is managed by the Health Research Authority (HRA) Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG) who maintain a list of approved projects. Currently the only project which has the necessary approvals to meet this requirement is the PRANA project, governed by the University of Southampton.

The process of obtaining the necessary CAG approvals if they are not already in place is extensive, and likely to take several years (DfT has previously followed these processes for previous linkage work, where data linkage was carried out by NHS England on behalf of DfT, but the agreements facilitating this have now lapsed). It is on this basis that a direct award to the PRANA project to undertake the requirement is justified.