The COVID-19 Data and Connectivity National Core Study is building a single, secure digital infrastructure to link together the UK’s fragmented health, administrative, and community datasets—such as hospital records, GP data, and housing information—so that approved researchers can access them quickly and safely. This matters because during the pandemic, critical datasets were often siloed and incompatible. A hospital record might not connect to a patient’s GP file or their socioeconomic background, making it impossible to fully understand why some groups were hit harder than others. Without this infrastructure, priority research questions—from vaccine effectiveness to long COVID—could not be answered efficiently or transparently. If successful, this study will create a permanent national data capability. Researchers will no longer waste months negotiating access to separate datasets; instead, they will work within secure Trusted Research Environments that treat data as a single, findable resource. This speeds up policy-relevant research not only for future pandemics but for any health condition where linking clinical, behavioural, and environmental data matters—improving the quiet infrastructure that underpins public health decision-making across the UK.
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The Data and Connectivity study sits across the other National Core Studies and delivers a national health data research capability to support COVID-19 research questions, ensuring datasets are discoverable and accessible and linkages are established to answer the priority research questions from the other five National Core Studies. Making data available for wider research use will increase the scope of benefits beyond the specific studies above, leading to unexpected benefits and boosting UK research capacity more generally, increasing return on investment for the NCS programme. Data integration and harmonisation of methods and standards will enable rapid research and development of new interventions and technologies across the spectrum of COVID-19, and knowledge and technology transfer to other clinical and public health areas. Collation and linkage between datasets is critical to bringing the core studies together, ensuring that each of them can deliver against their policy priorities e.g. hospital data may not currently be linked with GP data and wider community data (e.g. socioeconomic data or data on housing and the built environment). Access, cleaning, linkage and use of these datasets together is needed to fully understand links between these factors and outcomes. Delivery of the COVID-19 Data and Connectivity Study will involve close interaction with data custodians, the public and patients, and providers of UK-wide national Trusted Research Environments (TREs) to ensure the required data is stored safely and securely, made readily available to approved researchers and is associated with compute, analytical and data services that make it easier to address priority research questions in a transparent and trustworthy way. Phase 1 will: • Continue to respond to emerging COVID-19 research priorities, mapping key datasets required by the National Core Studies, NIHR UPH Studies and SAGE sub-groups to allow research which can inform policy and operational decision making across the UK • Further develop the data infrastructure and services across the UK to allow faster access to high priority health, administrative, molecular, and behavioural data assets for researchers working on the most important COVID-related studies, ensuring priority research questions can be answered efficiently, in a transparent and trustworthy way. • Strengthen and extend the existing national Trusted Research Environments (TRE) and UK Health Data Research Innovation Gateway infrastructure through inclusive four nations approach ensuring the priority datasets for COVID-19 research are findable, accessible, inter-operable and reusable (FAIR) as a single shop window
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