Health Data Research UK (HDR UK)

Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) is the UK’s national institute for health data science — an independent registered charity (charity number 1194431), not a government department or NHS body. Its stated mission is to accelerate trustworthy use of health data to enable discoveries that improve people’s lives, and it has operated since 2018. Rather than running a single physical research institute, HDR UK works as a convening and coordinating organisation across academia, the NHS, industry, charities, and the public, funded by nine funders including the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Health and Care Research Wales, the Chief Scientist Office, and the HSC Public Health Agency Research and Development Division.

What HDR UK actually does

For a research administrator, HDR UK is most visible through three pieces of shared national infrastructure it operates or convenes:

• The Health Data Research Gateway. A discovery-and-access catalogue that lets researchers and innovators search for UK health datasets, see what is available, and request access — rather than negotiating access one data controller at a time.
• The UK Health Data Research Alliance. An alliance of leading healthcare and research organisations that HDR UK convenes to agree common standards for the ethical, trustworthy use of health data — shared governance and best practice, not a data repository itself.
• Health Data Research Hubs. A network of regional centres of excellence, each focused on a specific health-data domain (such as respiratory disease or real-world evidence), that bring together NHS, academic, and industry partners around a shared dataset and research question.

HDR UK also runs training and capacity-building programmes — including early-career and internship schemes aimed at broadening participation in health data science — and funds and supports research infrastructure and methods development more broadly across its funders’ priorities.

HDR UK vs. the Health Data Research Service (HDRS): two different organisations

HDR UK is frequently conflated with the Health Data Research Service (HDRS), a newer, separate national initiative — but they are genuinely distinct bodies, not the same organisation under two names. HDRS is the central recommendation of the Sudlow Review (an independent review of the UK’s health data research landscape, published November 2024), announced by the UK Government in partnership with the Wellcome Trust in April 2025, backed by up to £600 million in combined funding. It is being built as a single, secure access route — a coordinating layer across data that continues to be held in its existing locations — and is being set up as its own independent organisation with its own governance, separate from HDR UK. HDR UK provided secretariat support to the Sudlow Review and is one of the bodies the HDRS is designed to work alongside once live, but HDR UK is the pre-existing (since 2018), charity-funded national institute, while the HDRS is new national infrastructure still being established. For the full comparison, including what the HDRS is expected to provide and its funding and governance, see CASRAI’s Health Data Research Service (HDRS) guide.

For research administrators, the practical distinction is this: HDR UK is a body you might partner with, apply to for a data-science training programme, or cite as a funder-adjacent research institute; the HDRS, once operational, is intended to be infrastructure your institution’s researchers will apply to use for streamlined health-data access.