Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust will establish a Secure Data Environment (SDE) for mental health research to improve understanding of mental health conditions and treatments.

The trust is working in partnership with the University of Liverpool through the Merseyside-based Mental Health Research for Innovation Centre (M-RIC) and has received more than £2.7 million funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

The funding allows Mersey Care to work with DATAMIND, the UK’s national data infrastructure for mental health research, to establish a SDE for NIHR’s Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration (MH-TRC).

The secure data platform will receive, store and analyse patient data from the MH-TRC, and support linkage of MH-TRC data with other health-related datasets such as the NHS SDE networks (regional NHS research hubs), making it easier for researchers to access data to better understand mental health conditions and improve treatments.

Dr Noir Thomas, chief medical officer at Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, said: “As a research active trust, Mersey Care is proud to be the NHS trust appointed to lead on NIHR’s SDE for the MH-TRC.

“The project will provide a simplified, secure and effective way for researchers to access the data they need. This saves time for busy clinicians and breaks down barriers for researchers.

“Ultimately, this will enable more ground-breaking studies to take place, all of which have the potential to transform and improve care and treatments for service users and patients across the country.”

The project brings together a network of the MH-TRC, 12 universities, seven mental health trusts, and all 11 NHS secure data environments.

The MH-TRC SDE will provide a federated data architecture design, that will mean researchers will be able to link and access data across a range of NHS and other data sources.

This establishes a unified and secure infrastructure for mental health research, creating a single ‘front door’ for researchers to access data through the DATAMIND trusted research environment.

Professor Ann John, principal investigator and co-director at DATAMIND, said: “We’re delighted to collaborate with Mersey Care and our partners to expand our existing trusted research environment by federating and enriching, data collected primarily for research, across NHS data sources.

“This initiative unites major UK mental health data innovations, such as the UKRI Mental Health Platform, through DATAMIND, to create an at-scale, secure and connected infrastructure for mental health research.

“By making high-quality mental health data more accessible and usable for approved researchers, we can accelerate discoveries that improve lives across the UK and beyond.”

NHS England launched a ‘common front door’, in partnership with Health Data Research UK, to give health researchers access to its SDE network last year.

The development of an open portal into SDEs came after an independent review by Professor Cathie Sudlow, chief scientist at Health Data Research UK, published in November 2024, called for barriers to accessing NHS patient data to be removed so that it can be used for research to further medical advances.