Version: 1.0.0 | Published: 8 Oct 2024 | Updated: 604 days ago
Documentation
Associated Media:
Description:
Our Future Health is a prospective, observational cohort study of the general adult population of the United Kingdom (UK). The programme aims to support a wide range of observational health research. We gather personal, health and lifestyle information from each participant through a self-completed baseline health questionnaire and at an in-person clinic visit. We will further link this data to other health-related data sets. Participants have also given consent for us to recontact them, for example to invite them to take part in further or repeat data collections, or other embedded studies such as clinical trials.
The Our Future Health programme is currently open to all adults (18 years and older) living in the UK. In July 2022, we started recruiting participants in England and will continue to expand across the rest of the UK. The data we’ve gathered so far (May 2026) includes linked NHS England clinical data on 1,666,336 participants
Additionally, there are also a number of linked datasets available including:
• Participant data, which contains information on participant sex, gender, ethnicity, month and year of birth, consent version, month and year of consent, month and year of registration, blood sample
• Self-reported baseline questionnaire data, which contains information of socio-economic, lifestyle and individual and family health
• Clinic measurements data, which includes blood pressure, height, weight, BMI, heart rate and POCT lipid profile
• Genetic data, which includes both genotyping array and imputed genetic data in two file formats (pVCF and BGEN format), and files with sample QC, kinship, ancestry and PCA loadings information
• Participant geographies data for all devolved nations including small area statistical zones such as LSOA, MSOA and Intermediate Zones
The data is stored in the Our Future Health Trusted Research Environment. We de-identify all participant data we gather before it’s available for use. All researchers will need to become registered researchers at Our Future Health and have an approved research study before they"re given access to the data.
We aim to collect a variety of data types from up to 5 million adult participants from across the UK. We hope to make more data types available on a quarterly basis.
Coverage
Spatial:
United Kingdom
Typical Age Range:
18-150
Follow Up:
Other
Provenance
Origin
Purposes:
Study
Collection Situations:
- Secondary care - In-patients
- Other
Temporal
Accrual Periodicity:
Biannual
Distribution Release Date:
28 May 2026
Start Date:
30 April 2021
End Date:
31 October 2025
Time Lag:
Variable
Accessibility
Access
Access Service:
The Our Future Health Trusted Research Environment (TRE) is a highly secure
computing environment, where researchers can access the Our Future Health data
they have applied for. The TRE is subject to rules, monitoring, and strict
controls to protect the data and participants' privacy. The Our
Future Health TRE has a range of tools available for analysing the data. More
information is available here:
https://research.ourfuturehealth.org.uk/analysing-the-data/ If you think our TRE
will not be able to meet your research needs, for example, if
you've developed complex software or analytical tools that would be
hard to recreate, you can apply to access the data using a different TRE.
Access Request Cost:
Delivery Lead Time:
Not applicable
Jurisdictions:
GB-ENG
Data Controller:
Our Future Health
Data Processor:
None
Usage
Data Use Limitations:
Research use only
Data Use Requirements:
- Project-specific restrictions
- Geographical restrictions
- Return to database or resource
- Time limit on use
- User-specific restriction
Resource Creators:
Our Future Health
Format and Standards
Vocabulary Encoding Schemes:
- ICD10
- OPCS4
- READ
Conforms To:
NHS DATA DICTIONARY
Languages:
en
Formats:
csv, tsv
Observations
Statistical Population
Population Description
Population Size
Measured Property
Observation Date
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to Admitted Patient Care (HES APC) records - Episodes of care where a participant is admitted at NHS hospitals in England.
8780651
Count
31 October 2025
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) Cancer Pathways.
11972942
Count
21 July 2021
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NHS and Office of National Statistics Death Registration records for England and Wales.
5579
Count
26 November 2025
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NDRS Cancer Registry Treatment records.
511445
Count
12 June 2025
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NDRS Cancer Registry pre-1995.
10141
Count
31 December 1994
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NHS Outpatient (HES OP) records - Outpatient appointments at NHS hospitals in England.
58792752
Count
31 October 2025
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NHS HES A&E records - Attendances recorded at major A&E departments, single specialty A&E departments, walk-in centres, and minor injury units.
4300065
Count
31 March 2020
Events
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to NDRS Cancer Researcher Patient Tumour records.
225808
Count
31 December 2023
Persons
Persons who consented to joining Our Future Health with a completed questionnaire and have been linked to their health records through NHS England.
1690704
Count
31 October 2025