OpenSAFELY news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today!

We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.

This is a major landmark in UK data infrastructure. OpenSAFELY has been able to provision whole population GP data for analysis, but until today our resources have only been available for COVID-19 questions. From now, through the wider NHS OpenSAFELY Ministerial Direction, the service can expand.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to use GP data at scale, improving clinical care and health outcomes for all. We have one action for everyone reading this post: if you know any researcher who works with GP data, or would like it, please share this page with them.

Using OpenSAFELY

Our large and productive user community has already produced a huge volume of outputs in OpenSAFELY. You can hear from users at KCL, UKHSA, Manchester and Southampton and more, all telling their own stories, in their own words, about working in the platform.

Their research is all made possible through the extraordinary power in GP records, which have been made securely accessible through the OpenSAFELY tools, which provide innovative technical safeguards for privacy and transparency. The information in these records - under the tightest governance - can be used to improve health outcomes across a vast range of clinical topics, enabling life-saving research into the causes of disease; the consequences of ill-health; treatment uptake; treatment benefits; treatment risks; and more. It can be used to explore treatment costs, and other crucial health economic questions. It can be used to explore pathway compliance, and help find ways to optimise the delivery of care.

Because of our commitment to open delivery, everything you need to evaluate OpenSAFELY is online. You can learn in detail how to work in the platform, through our comprehensive technical documentation (150,000 words, on all aspects of the platform and tools). You can read about the datasets available. You can read about our co-piloting service. You can do the getting started tutorial - and interact with the OpenSAFELY tools in a live online sandbox using randomly generated dummy data, before you even apply to be a user. You can use our online feasibility tool to see trends in SNOMED code usage across the country. We have a feasibility service to advise prospective users, and deep experience designing and supporting research in GP data.

Submit a study application

If you are a researcher or analyst with an application to submit, visit the new applications section of our website, or contact us if you have any queries. From here, it’s over to you!

Timelines and details

NHS England will be accepting applications for using OpenSAFELY from today until 30th April 2026 at 17:00. After this date, the initial submission window will close. All applications submitted within this timeframe will be reviewed by the Bennett Institute (for things like completeness, accreditations and feasibility). They will then all be passed to NHS England, the Data Controller, who will decide which projects to approve. All applicants, successful or not, will be informed of NHSE’s decision (and their estimated project start date) by 31st May 2026.

NHS England will now charge Project Teams £25,000 per project to use the OpenSAFELY Service. This is paid to NHS England. You can read more about this on their website. It is helpful if NHS England can see prospective use cases for the service, so please do submit the form even if you don’t immediately have funding available, seek resources in parallel, and check the appropriate box on the form to indicate this.

Thank you

OpenSAFELY is a huge collaborative project, across multiple organisations and sectors. We are profoundly grateful to all those who have contributed to the platform including (but not limited to): our colleagues at NHS England, the Data Controller for the platform (and so much more); the GP profession, for their critical support and advice (and for creating this data in the first place); our PPIE groups; our productive users and academic collaborators; our funders (especially NHS England and Wellcome); the EHR system suppliers Optum and TPP, for their pro bono work and deep expertise; the patients who lived the lives captured in this data; our oversight groups; and many more besides. Your hard work drives vital improvements in clinical care, through data: we are all hugely grateful.

About OpenSAFELY

OpenSAFELY is an award winning platform that was designed from the ground up to deliver privacy, transparency, and usability. Researchers get ‘dummy data’ to develop their analysis, then submit their analyses for automated remote execution against real patient records, without ever needing to move data, or interact directly with sensitive personal information. By doing this the platform has earned the trust of the professions, privacy campaigners, patient groups and citizens juries. OpenSAFELY is also a public asset: all our code is given away for free, so that everyone can see it, understand it, and re-use it. You can read more about OpenSAFELY here.