Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Please find attached the trail of correspondence regarding the issue of how the FOI submission request form does not accept hyphenated email addresses.

I have again tried to use my work email and the same error message appears – and I am prevented from submitting my request (see screenshot at the end of my email in March and the same error appeared today (22/05/2023). In the meantime, may I request that you accept the following 2 requests as of today and please let me know when the issue is resolved.

A/ 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 the month of March and April 2023 in EXCEL format please.
To be absolutely clear, the data should be:

Column1--Administration Month

Column2--ODS Code

Column3--Pharmacy Name

Column4--Pharmacy Trading Name

Column5--Pharmacy Address

Column6--Pharmacy Post Code

Column7--Number of Vaccinations Claimed

Column8--Number of Vaccinations Paid

Column9--Payment Amount GBP

Your request was received on 22nd June 2023, and I am dealing with it under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

March 2023 Under Section 21 of the Act, we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you. The information you requested for March is available from web link:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01086

April 2023 A copy of the information for April is attached. Please read the below notes to ensure correct 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.

In order to be paid in a timely manner, such claims must be submitted during a specified declaration submission period. Should claims be submitted outside the submission period, they will be processed in the following period. This means that in some cases there is a difference between the number of vaccines that have been 'claimed' and the number that have been 'paid'. Both the number of 'claimed' and 'paid' vaccinations have been reported in this request.

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.

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

For example; a PCN patient is given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month) and then the paper record of this is misplaced for a while. The record is found and 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; a Pharmacy patient is 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 Freedom of Information request, we have reported by Administration Month.

The data included in this request is limited to vaccinations carried out by pharmacies only, which were administered in April 2023. The latest data used is a snapshot of the MYS system data that was taken on 9th May 2023. This is the snapshot of data taken after the April 2023 submission period that was used to calculate payments. The Pharmacy name and address are as held on this date.

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. 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. It is possible for new records from old administration months to be entered in the future, thus the totals here for each administration month could change when more data is processed.

Please note that this response will be published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01184