The University of Oxford has been awarded a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Higher and Further Education, recognising the globally impactful work of the OpenSAFELY platform.
Based within the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, OpenSAFELY was created during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It pioneered a new method of accessing whole-population NHS GP data – which OpenSAFELY made accessible for the first time in history – unlocking life-saving research while protecting patient privacy more robustly than ever before.
The Queen Elizabeth Prizes (formerly the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes) are the highest national honour awarded in UK further and higher education. They are granted every two years by the Sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister, recognising work that shows excellence, innovation, and well-evidenced benefit for the wider world.
Innovating around privacy
Traditional methods of data analysis often involve moving large datasets to researchers. OpenSAFELY reversed this model. Researchers get “dummy data” to develop their analysis, then submit their analyses for automated remote execution against real patient records, without ever needing to move data, or interact directly with sensitive personal information.
OpenSAFELY has also been highly productive, with users at dozens of organisations on more than 200 projects.
The official citation for the award describes OpenSAFELY as: "A globally impactful data analysis platform [that] uses new methods to access the entire England population’s NHS GP records for the first time, meeting complex privacy challenges to enable life-saving research by unlocking and protecting a goldmine of data."
From pandemic response to mental health
While OpenSAFELY was initially built to answer urgent questions about COVID-19 risk factors and vaccine effectiveness, in 2023 NHS England announced its expansion for broader health research, as a critical national asset.
Earlier this year, the team received significant investment from Wellcome to expand to non-UK and non-health datasets, including work with the NHS Talking Therapies datasets - alongside GP records - to answer vital questions about which treatments work best for specific patient groups. The team have also begun work on schools’ data in collaboration with the National Institute of Teaching.
A rigorous independent review
The prize follows a rigorous process of independent review carried out by the Royal Anniversary Trust.
Sir Damon Buffini, Chair of the Royal Anniversary Trust, said: "The Queen Elizabeth Prizes for Higher and Further Education celebrate the power of education to change the world for the better. This much-loved national honour recognises, at the highest level of state, outstanding work in UK universities and colleges, and the remarkable benefit they bring to our economy, society and the wider world."
Professor Ben Goldacre, Director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science, said:
"Patient data can supercharge research, but it must be treated with huge respect: those medical records contain, by definition, the most confidential medical secrets of every citizen in the country. Our work has shown that you can have data access and patient privacy, safely unlocking data access to improve healthcare for all, if platforms are designed with innovative privacy-preserving methods at their core. OpenSAFELY is also a public asset: all our code is given away for free, so that everyone can see it, understand it, and re-use it.
“OpenSAFELY is a huge collaboration, across many organisations and sectors including our team, the electronic health record vendors TPP and EMIS, patient and professional groups, our hugely productive researchers and users, and NHS England. We are honoured to have won this prize, and we hope that more users will come to tap the power in this confidential patient data through secure means.”
The prizes will be formally presented at a ceremony in London in February 2026.
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