Request

Dear NHSBSA FOI team, Thank you for fulfilling my previous FOI request number 18018. May I please make the same request but for any newer months for which data is available, i.e. July and August 2021?

Response

Data for August 2021 At the time your request was made the information you requested for August 2021 was not held by the NHS Business Services Authority. Please submit a new FOI request for this data.

Data for July 2021 A copy of the information, together with the accompanying caveats is attached. There is a completed file for each month. FOI8592 has 2 files (February 2019 and March 2019)

Source System – ISP (National MIS Files)

NHSBSA 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.

This report consists of a management information file detailing monthly Community Pharmacy and Appliance Payments by type of payment and contractor account. Payments include all drug costs, fees, patient charges, locally authorised payments, etc. Other details such as the numbers of items dispensed, patient’s charges collected are also included.

The management information file reflects the contractor's payment and prescription data associated with the sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs) structure at the relevant payment date.

The data contained within the files can be interpreted correctly by using the ‘MIS Glossary’ available under ‘Management Information Spreadsheet (MIS) Report’ at https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/information-services-portal-isp/isp-report-information .

The data in column METHADONE PAYMT and ADD FEE-2E within the Pharmacy dataset have been removed following Information Governance policy.

Appliance Contractors data within the MIS- Report shows data for the following month. (E.g. MIS-Report for January 19 will show February 19 Appliance Contractor data).

There is a list of previous requests and which months we have provided called MIS FOI Requests in IST/Reference – please add new requests and months provided to this.

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

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-18101