Public Views on Data Federation Across the North of England: Synthesising Insights from the PANORAMA Project

The Northern Secure Data Environment (SDE) partnership is working to enable federated access to health and care data across three regions: North East and North Cumbria (NENC), North West (NW), and Yorkshire and Humber (Y&H). As part of the PANORAMA project, the Northern SDE partnership undertook activites to understand the public's views on federation. Major findings are that public participants broadly accept the case for federation when it is framed around public benefit, particularly rare diseases, health inequalities and population-level insight that cannot be achieved by single regions working alone. However, confidence drops as discussions move from principle to practice. Federation is not rejected outright, but it raises a series of trust tests that the current system design and narrative does not yet fully pass.