Request

I am conducting an audit on Cannabis based medicinal products (CBPM) and I am struggling to find prescribing data related to this field. I would be extremely grateful if it was possible for you to share any prescribing data that you have in relation to this over the last 4.5 years since it became legal. In particular I was hoping you would have data for FP10CD forms that would have been submitted to yourselves from dispensing pharmacies.

You subsequently clarified your request with the following:

Yes, you are correct, it is the private unlicensed data which I am looking for. Ideally, if possible a total number of prescriptions done from Nov 2018 until present with a yearly breakdown of the figures. Would it be possible to further break this down into the type of prescription preparation for example, the number of prescriptions that were for oils, vapes or flowers?

Response

A copy of the information is attached.

NHS Prescription Services process prescriptions for Pharmacy Contractors, Appliance Contractors, Dispensing Doctors and Personal Administration with information then used to make payments to pharmacists and appliance contractors in England for prescriptions dispensed in primary care settings (other arrangements are in place for making payments to Dispensing Doctors and Personal Administration). This involves processing over 1 billion prescription items and payments totalling over £9 billion each year. The information gathered from this process is then used to provide information on costs and trends in prescribing in England and Wales to over 25,000 registered NHS and Department of Health and Social Care users.

Data Source When prescriptions are processed by NHSBSA data capture, prescriptions sometimes contain prescribing of medicines that were not populated on the NHSBSA drug database at the time. This type of order will be captured as an ‘unspecified drug.’ Data for prescribing of unlicensed cannabis-based medicines has been taken from data captured as unspecified prescribing. Unlicensed cannabis-based medicines are identified by an additional review process which occurs after the prescriptions have been processed. The items identified by this review are reported against the date that the prescription was written and not necessarily when they were submitted. Therefore, these figures may be subject to change if the prescription is submitted to the NHSBSA in a later month.

This dataset This dataset is shown in two parts. Part 1 shows monthly items for private prescriptions for unlicensed cannabis-based products. Part 2 is a drug list of the privately prescribed unlicensed cannabis-based products in the same time period.

Time Period November 2018 to September 2022 monthly (the latest available month currently).

Organisation Data Data for private unlicensed prescriptions is limited to prescriptions dispensed in England.

Items shows the number of times a product appears on a prescription form not the quantity prescribed.

Please note that this request and our response is published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01114