Transformation Directorate

Current NHS England PhD Data Science internship projects

Current projects available as internships

We welcome project proposals from both prospective students and interested organisations.  Please contact datascience@nhs.net with any queries.

Most of the projects have a data science element to them and cover themes including:

  • natural language processing
  • synthetic data
  • graph representations
  • machine learning
  • privacy enhancing technologies
  • AI explainability
  • image Identification

Details of current and available projects can be found on our GitHub pages: https://nhsx.github.io/nhsx-internship-projects/

Supervision

Any potential intern will need the approval and oversight of their academic supervisor before they can apply for and accept an internship place.  

Successful applicants will be allocated an NHS England supervisor for the duration of the project and internship. In some cases a project specific mentor will also be appointed.  

Intellectual property

Each party shall continue to own all of its own background intellectual property (IP). NHS England shall own the results of the project, save that the student shall own the copyright in their report. NHS England shall grant the hosting university and any project partner an irrevocable, fully paid-up, royalty free, non-exclusive license to use the results for academic and non-commercial research purposes. NHS England requires advanced sight and sign-off of any publications and communications about the project. Approval would also be required for any results being used beyond teaching purposes and if the university wishes to develop the results for commercial purposes. This approval would be based on the following:

  • NHS England is not prevented from developing further the outputs of any project and in enabling its use in the NHS or commercialising a product.
  • NHS England fully benefits financially if the output of any project is commercialised.

Information governance, sensitive data and confidentiality

All parties and the students agree to keep secret all confidential information not generally available to the public that is marked or labelled as confidential prior to or at the point of disclosure, which is provided to them by the other party in connection with the project. Notwithstanding the above if instructed by a competent legal authority, or where disclosure is required under law, the parties will have the right to disclose confidential information subject to the following:

If disclosure of confidential information is required, the parties together with the students will discuss the necessary minimum level of information needed to meet the disclosure requirements before making the disclosure. If confidential information is imparted or disclosed verbally this must be confirmed in writing within thirty (30) days of the disclosure. The parties and the students shall use confidential information solely for the purposes of carrying out the project (including the provision of the reports and presentations) and for no other purpose. No licence to use any party’s confidential information is given under this agreement except the rights specifically described in this letter.