Thank you for your request for information about the following:

I am writing to request the following information under the Freedom of Information Act (2000)

For the calendar years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020,2021, 2022 and 2023 to date (broken down by individual year) please provide the number of prescriptions for the following:

BNF 060402 Male sex hormones and antagonists

Please also advise if there are any other drugs prescribed for testosterone suppression and if so please include data for these drugs in a separate table.

Please segregate the data further into the following age ranges 15-25, 26-35, 36-45, 46-55, 56-65.

Please further segregate the data by male and female if the drugs are ever prescribed to women.

Your request was received on 13 June 2023 and I am dealing with it under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

BNF 060402

A copy of the information is attached.

Drugs prescribed for testosterone suppression

We are unable to identify drugs which have been prescribed for testosterone suppression. No data is captured relating to the clinical indication a prescription is intended for. Some of these products can be used for a variety of clinical indications and therefore the drugs prescribed may have been prescribed for a different condition. If you require data on additional drugs, you would need to specify them in a new Freedom of Information request.

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

The data source was the NHSBSA Information Services Data Warehouse.

Exclusions

The Data excludes:

• Items not dispensed, disallowed and those returned to the contractor for further clarification.

• Prescriptions prescribed and dispensed in Prisons, Hospitals and Private prescriptions.

• Items prescribed but not presented for dispensing or not submitted to NHS Prescription Services by the dispenser.

Time Period

April 2015 - April 2023 - the entire period for which gender and age are routinely captured

Data is presented by Calendar Year. 2015 is April - December only and 2023 is January - April only.

Drugs

Limited to drugs prescribed in the following BNF Paragraph: 060402 - Male sex hormones and antagonists

These medicines are classified by their primary therapeutic indication. However, it is possible that they can be prescribed for other reasons outside of this primary therapeutic indication. The clinical indication of a prescription is not captured by NHSBSA during processing, and therefore we cannot determine the reason that a prescription was issued.

Organisation Data

Prescribing is limited to prescribing in England only, but no limits on dispensing.

Age Group

The age used for this analysis is the age that is captured during NHSBSA processing. Patient age has then been grouped into the following bands

15-25,

26-35,

36-45,

46-55,

56-65

Items prescribed to patients outside of these age bands, or where the age was not captured, has been excluded.

NHSBSA stores information on the age of the recipient of each prescription as it was read by computer from images of paper prescriptions or as attached to message sent through the electronic prescription system. The NHSBSA does not validate, verify, or manually check the resulting information as part of the routine prescription processing. However an additional check is carried out on a yearly basis to check the capture rate and accuracy of the stored patient information. The results of this check for the most recent time period available (January 2020 to December 2020) show that for both paper and electronic prescriptions patient age was captured from 94.88% of prescription forms and the accuracy of age data captured was 99.95%. Checks revealed issues in the reliability of age data in particular the quality of the stored age data was poor for patients recorded as aged 2 years and under. When considering the accuracy of age data it is expected that a small number of prescriptions may be allocated against any given patient age incorrectly.

Gender

Patient gender has been reported using the latest patient gender information held by the NHSBSA Information Services data warehouse at the time that the data was extracted. This uses information from either the most recent Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) message or from the last time that NHSBSA received data about the patient's gender from NHS Personal Demographics Service. Unknown means not recorded. Unspecified means recorded but not as either Male or Female. This could mean male, female, transitioning or transitioned, or non-binary. The data is unclear, intentionally or not.

Items

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

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact foidata@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 communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk 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 2023” 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.