Thank you for your request for information about the following:

‘The number of COVID vaccinations carried out and payments made for these vaccinations to individual pharmacies, listed by their ODS code and with full postal address details. Could you provide the data for each month from April 2021 to March 2022 (inclusive) in EXCEL format please.’

Your request was received on 24 April 2023 and has been dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

A copy of the information is attached. Please read the below notes for a full understanding of the data.

The NHSBSA calculates payments for covid vaccinations to Pharmacies and Primary Care Network (PCN) providers in England.

Covid vaccination data is keyed in via Point of Care (POC) Systems and they transferred to the NHSBSA Manage Your Service (MYS) application.

Each month, vaccine providers submit claims to request payment based on the data that has been transferred into MYS. This request is limited to claims which have been paid.

When considering the nature of the vaccine data there are several ways it can be reported over time:

Administration Month - This is the month in which the vaccine was administered to the patient.

Payment Month - This is the month in which the payment was made dispenser of the vaccine.

Note that all payments for Pharmacies are paid one month later than those for PCN providers.

Keying Month - This is the month in which the vaccine record first appeared on the MYS system.

Submission/Claim Month - This is the month in which the claim for payment for a vaccination occurred.

For example, suppose that a PCN patient is given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month) and the record is keyed into a POC system during February (Keying Month). The Provider is allowed to claim for keying during February in the first 5 days of March, but they're a little late and authorise the claim on the 7th of March (Submission Month); as the claim is outside the submission window it is not paid in March, it will instead be paid during April (Payment Month).

Another example could be a Pharmacy patient given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month), keyed in January (Keying Month), then submitted in February (Submission Month) and then payments are calculated in February, however as this is for a pharmacy the payments are held back and not paid until March (Payment Month).

For the purposes of this request, we have chosen to report by Administration Month.

Data included in this request is limited to vaccinations carried out by Pharmacies only.

Data included in this request is also limited to vaccinations administered April 2021 and March 2022 inclusive.

The latest data used is a snapshot of the MYS system data that was taken on 6th April 2023. This is the snapshot of data taken after the March 2023 submission period that was used to calculate payments. Pharmacy name and address are as held in the NHSBSA data warehouse for the given administration month.

This payment data does not include any adjustments made by NHSBSA Provider Assurance as part of post payment verification exercise. These adjustments are made at account level and may relate to several months of activity.

Payment data includes payments made and those scheduled for payment in the future.

Payments comprise an Item of Service fee and potentially a Supplementary fee. Payments do not relate to the value of the drugs dispensed.

The total used for the payment calculation may not match the totals shown in 'live' POC systems or MYS that continue to receive updates after the snapshot used to calculate payments was taken.

Vaccination records are limited to those which have been associated with a declaration submission. This may include late submission declarations received after the deadline for declarations such records are not processed until the next month.

Please note that some vaccinations attract a supplementary fee, so it is not possible to determine the number of vaccinations by dividing the total paid by the basic Item of Service (IoS) fee.

Data is given in 2 files; FOI01124_PAID – the number of paid vaccines as described above and additional Uplift data in FOI01124_UPLIFT , which has additional caveats below.

The data used for uplift payments is from a series of snapshots of data from the MYS system data used to calculate covid payments at the end of each declaration window from October 2021 to May 2022.

Uplift Payments Explanation

Additional Covid Vaccine payments were made to Primary Care Networks (PCN) in February, March and May 2022 where applicable to doses administered between 16 September 2021 and 31 January 2022.

Specifically:

1. An uplift of +£2.42 for each COVID-19 vaccination dose administered from 1 December 2021 to 31 January 2022. In combination with the standard payment (£12.58) this takes the total Item of Service (IoS) payment to £15.00.

2. An additional uplift of +£5.00 for each COVID-19 vaccination dose administered on any Sunday between 1 December 2021 to 31 January 2022 or at any time between 25 December 2021 to 3 January 2022. In combination with the standard payment (£12.58) and first uplift (+£2.42) this takes the total IoS payment to £20.00.

3. An uplift of +£20.00 for each COVID-19 vaccination dose administered to a housebound patient between 16 September 2021 and 31 December 2021. In combination with the standard supplement (£10.00) this takes the total supplement to £30.

This data includes only the additional uplift amounts and not the standard fee rates of £12.58 +£10.00 where applicable. The standard fee amounts were paid separately.

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact nhsbsa.foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact nhsbsa.communicationsteam@nhs.net. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement:

“NHSBSA Copyright 2022” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated.

Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.