Aim: Our aim is to improve the usefulness of an established UK resource, the National Neonatal Research Database (NNRD) for parents and for researchers so that they can view data and conduct studies to improve the care of preterm and sick newborn babies more quickly, efficiently and at lower cost than presently. About 1 in 7 (100,000 each year) newborn babies is admitted to a NHS neonatal unit. Neonatal problems and the care received, affect life-long health and well-being. Background: We established the NNRD, a unique, award-winning resource, in collaboration with parents, doctors, nurses, other healthcare professionals, and researchers to improve care, treatments and outcomes for preterm and sick babies admitted to NHS neonatal units. The NNRD contains comprehensive data, updated quarterly, from the electronic medical notes of all babies admitted to NHS neonatal units in England, Scotland and Wales. Imperial College London hosts the NNRD securely on a computer server. No data that can identify any individual baby are included. The data include details of diseases, daily treatments and outcomes. To-date the NNRD has information on about one million babies; around 25,000 new babies are added each quarter. Why this work is needed: We established the NNRD because a key challenge in newborn care is the need for up-to-date, timely and accurate data for research to improve, evaluate and develop new treatments. Data are required for all of the many types of studies needed, such as improving understanding of diseases, their causes and the care provided, and to develop new medicines. Different types of studies often need similar data (e.g. age, sex, weight, disease) but traditionally, researchers collect these again and again for each new purpose. This is expensive, wastes time and increases the risk of errors. Studies can fail because data availability or quality are poor. Data also need to be up-to-date otherwise information may be misleading. For example, information on health outcomes of very preterm babies that are widely used in the UK to counsel parents and guide clinical practice was derived from research conducted over 20 years ago and no longer reflects circumstances today. The NNRD provides a single source of up-to-date data for research and other purposes. This work is needed to improve the NNRD and make it more useful. Our objectives, and what we will do: We will automate processes to check accuracy and add new data into the NNRD that we currently perform manually. At present anyone who wants to use the NNRD must request our assistance, which inevitably incurs a delay. We will identify common types of information that researchers, parents and clinicians would find useful to obtain from the NNRD. This might be to determine the number of patients with particular conditions that are admitted to neonatal units. We will also obtain views on the way in which they would like to see the results (e.g. tables or graphs). This will help us develop web-based tools to enable parents and researchers to answer common questions themselves. We will make these tools available on our website. We will also develop ways to process NNRD data so that we can apply new techniques that can help identify patterns such as where particular types of disease occur and provide clues to their causes. Additionally, we will train young scientists in handling complex health data. Why this partnership is needed: We have formed a partnership because our objectives require skills across different organisations and disciplines. Our partnership brings clinical neonatologists, academic researchers and data scientists together with the national information technology lead for the health and care system in England (NHS Digital), expertise in data tools (Strategic Intelligence Alliance for Health; SIA), the national charity for preterm and sick newborn babies (Bliss) and the national institute for health data, Health Data Research (UK HDR-UK).