Researchers

Our Future Health will give researchers from universities, charities, the NHS and companies involved in health research the opportunity to discover and test more effective ways to predict, detect and treat major diseases through a data set that truly reflects the UK’s population.

Resources available

Our secure trusted research environment (TRE) has a varied toolkit for preparing and analysing a wide range of data types. There is a comprehensive list of tools available on our research site.

How it works for researchers

The scale, depth and detail of Our Future Health make it a world-leading resource for health research. The programme will enable the discovery and a huge number of diseases. These include:

  • identifying new signals to detect diseases much earlier
  • developing new ways to identify people at higher risk of disease
  • enabling better interventions by creating more effective tools, treatments and technologies

The Our Future Health programme provides two main types of resource for health research:

  • a prospective observational data set for basic science, discovery and research, for example on the causes and early signs of disease
  • a translational research platform comprising a cohort of people who can be re-contacted for further studies 

Studies using Our Future Health data

Researchers are already studying Our Future Health data to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases. 

We publish a summary of every study using Our Future Health data on the Health Data Research UK website. To see the list of the studies, go to the website and select ‘Data Uses’. 

Apply to become a researcher 

We welcome applications from health researchers with a focus on disease prevention, detection and treatment.

Our governance

Find out more about the boards and committees that make up our governance, including the Access Board, who review applications for research.
Read more about our governance

Trusted Research Environments

Learn more about how we make our data available for research in a secure data environment
Read more about our TRE

Key document

Our Future Health Protocol

VersionFersiwn 6.0 | February 2025 | PDF: 15 MB

Ethics and Governance Framework

VersionFersiwn 2 | April 2021 | PDF: 514 KB