Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
OpenSAFELY analysing NHS England primary-care data in situ across millions of patient records.
- Is an instance
SAIL Databank at Swansea University as a long-established TRE for Welsh population data.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A standard remote desktop with no disclosure controls is not a TRE.
- Not an instance
A researcher's laptop with downloaded data is the opposite of a TRE.
Editorial commentary
TREs implement a 'bring the analysis to the data' model, originally articulated by the Office for National Statistics' Secure Research Service and now widely adopted (NHS England Sub-National Secure Data Environments; SAIL Databank; The Health Informatics Centre at the University of Dundee; OpenSAFELY). Researchers connect to a controlled environment, run analyses against the data, and only aggregated, disclosure-controlled outputs leave the environment. Operationalisation of TREs typically aligns to the Five Safes framework. Standards work is underway through the Goldacre Review recommendations, the UK Health Data Research Alliance's Green Paper on TREs, and DARE UK.
Accreditation typically follows a maturity model rather than a single certification: the UK Health Data Research Alliance’s TRE accreditation work and the DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme both assess environments against Five-Safes-aligned criteria covering governance, technical controls, and output disclosure review, and ISO/IEC 27001 information-security certification is common as a supporting control rather than a TRE-specific standard in its own right. ‘Data safe haven’ is a closely related term with UK/Scottish administrative-data roots that is sometimes used interchangeably with TRE and sometimes treated as a narrower, single-institution instance of the broader TRE model; see the dedicated data safe haven entry for how a given institution or funder draws that boundary. For a fuller walkthrough of how the Five Safes maps onto TRE governance in practice, see the dedicated Five Safes Framework guide.
References
- Goldacre B., 'Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis' (UK Department of Health and Social Care, 2022). Lea N.C. et al., 'Trustworthy use of patient data: an international comparative ethnography of trusted research environments', Nature Medicine 30, 2024.
Also known as
TRE · Secure Data Environment · SDE
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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