The Scottish National Safe Haven
Supported by eDRIS at Public Health Scotland and Research Data Scotland, the Scottish National Safe Haven enables secure access to data covering the Scottish population for approved research in the public benefit.
About the Scottish National Safe Haven
The National Safe Haven is a governed, Trusted Research Environment (TRE) for accredited researchers to work on approved projects of public benefit using sensitive data. It is a secure environment where national level data for a research project is uploaded and accessed.
Access to this data is facilitated by the electronic Data Research and Innovation Service (eDRIS) within Public Health Scotland, and Research Data Scotland.
Datasets available
The National Safe Haven enables access to a wide range of datasets in areas including health, education, social care, children's lives and outcomes, and more.
Discover datasets available for research via the RDS metadata catalogue
Health data in the National Safe Haven
Examples of health datasets available through the National Safe Haven include:
acute hospital episodes held in the national Scottish Morbidity Records
data held in the Unscheduled Care Data Mart (A&E, Scottish Ambulance Service, GP out of hours, NHS24)
prescription data
National Records of Scotland (NRS) births, stillbirths, infant deaths
National Records of Scotland (NRS) death records
Scottish Birth Record (SBR)
COVID tests, vaccinations
COG UK Metadata
Scottish Medical Imaging
Based within the National Safe Haven, Scottish Medical Imaging (SMI) provides access to a database of de-identified medical images, subsets of which can be linked to other health and administrative data for approved research. The resource was developed collaboratively by the Health Informatics Centre (HIC), University of Dundee, the eDRIS team at Public Health Scotland and EPCC, University of Edinburgh.
Find out more about Scottish Medical Imaging
ADR Scotland Programme
As a delivery partner on the ADR Scotland programme, RDS has helped to make administrative datasets more readily linkable and securely available for research in the National Safe Haven.
This includes data in areas such as qualifications, educational outcomes, social care, the lives of children and young people, and more.
Find out more about RDS’s involvement in the ADR Scotland programme.
How to enquire
Researchers can begin an enquiry via the Researcher Access Service – a digital platform managed by RDS in partnership with eDRIS. A member of the eDRIS team will then assess the project to understand the most appropriate data access pathway.
Depending on which datasets the researcher requests, their application may be eligible for the Research Data Access Pathway, taking advantage of RDS’s agreement with Public Health Scotland to provide faster, simpler access to an expanding set of datasets through a fully digitised end-to-end application and governance process underpinned by the Five Safes Framework.
If the project does not qualify for the Research Data Access Pathway, the researcher will progress through the PBPP Approval Pathway, supported by eDRIS, or may be directed to another relevant organisation (such as Scotland’s Regional Safe Havens) to continue its journey.
