Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Following receipt of my FOI request 01586 received in January 2024 I would like to request the same information for the period October 2023 to December 2023 by month. I understand that FOI 01681 may contain October and November 2023, please let me know.

Please can you provide the information in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.

Your request was received on 19/04/2023 and I am dealing with it under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

Due to the large size of the file we cannot email these to you. It will be available on the Open Data Portal. Please read the below notes to gain a full understanding of the data.

Caveats

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.

Please note drugs flagged in our database as Schedule 2 and 3 controlled drugs have been excluded from this dataset for information security reasons to prevent the identification of organisations with high levels of controlled drug dispensing.

Time Period

December 2023 and January 2024. This will need to be filtered to the requested time period.

Organisation

For data for this request FOI 01795 (a rerun of FOI 01586) for items dispensed by appliance contractors in England, filter to 'English Appliance Contractor' on the column ACCOUNT_TYPE.

BNF Code

The 11 characters at the beginning of a BNF code which specifies a Product (generic or branded) but not its strength or formulation.

PRODUCT_ORDER_NUMBER and PACK_ORDER_NUMBER

If this is not held in our database then it will be blank.

Items

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

NIC_GBP

The cost of the supplied item(s) calculated from the reimbursement price held on the NHSBSA master database. Given in Pounds Stirling.

TOTAL_QUANTITY

Total quantity is the number of items multiplied by the quantity prescribed. e.g. 2 items prescribed, one with a quantity of 2 and one with a quantity of 3, the total quantity would show as 5 (1 item x quantity of 2) + (1 item x quantity of 3)

EPD_FLAG

When this says 'EPD' the data is included in the English Prescribing dataset on our open data portal. This means the prescriptions were prescribed in England by GP practices/cost centres, dispensed in England, Jersey, Guernsey/Alderny, IOM, Wales, Scotland.

A link to the EPD https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/english-prescribing-data-epd

ACCOUNT_TYPE

Categorises the dispensing contractor according to country and type of contractor.

BNF_APPLIANCE_FLAG

Indicates if the presentation is categorised in the BNF chapters 20-23.

EPD_BNF_20_21_22

Indicates that the prescription is included in the English Prescribing dataset and the presentation is categorised in the BNF chapters 20-22.

EPD_BNF_23

Indicates that the prescription is included in the English Prescribing dataset and the presentation is categorised in the BNF chapter 23.

ENG_PRESC_BNF20_23

Indicates the prescription was prescribed in England, and the presentation is categorised in the BNF chapters 20-23. This is not limited by the type of prescribing organisation or the dispensing location.

October 2023 and November 2023

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

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01681

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

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01795

Data Queries

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data please contact nhsbsa.foirequests@nhs.net 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 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.