Open Safely DPIA templates

NHS England established the OpenSAFELY COVID-19 Service during the pandemic to support the use of data for COVID-19 purposes. Learning from the COVID-19 Service, the new OpenSAFELY Data Analytics Service Pilot will support non-COVID-19 analysis, including research, clinical audit, service evaluation and health surveillance.

These services use pseudonymised GP data and other pseudonymised datasets from NHS England. NHS England’s information governance (IG) frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the OpenSAFELY services explain how this data is used and under which legal bases, and provide information about access requests and approvals required to use the data.

The FAQs also include data protection impact assessment (DPIA) templates for GP practices to complete as controllers of the GP datasets used by the OpenSAFELY services. They can be further adapted by IG professionals as needed:

OpenSAFELY COVID-19 Service template DPIA for GP practices

OpenSAFELY Data Analytics Service template DPIA for GP practices