Request

‘Are you able to provide the number of items dispensed in the community and number of patients, split by Year of Birth between 1st January 2023 and 31st December 2023. Please exclude hospital and dental prescribing. Please only look at items prescribed and dispensed in England.’

Response

A copy of the information is attached. Please read the below notes to ensure correct understanding of the data.

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.

Fewer than five Please be aware that I have decided not to release the full details where the total number of individuals falls below five. This is because the individuals could be identified, when combined with other information that may be in the public domain or reasonably available. This information falls under the exemption in section 40 subsections 2 and 3 (a) of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This is because it would breach the first data protection principle as:
a - it is not fair to disclose individual’s personal details to the world and is likely to cause damage or distress. b - these details are not of sufficient interest to the public to warrant an intrusion into the privacy of the individual.
Please click the below web link to see the exemption in full.
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/40

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 January 2023 to December 2023 inclusive

Organisation Data
The data provided is for prescriptions prescribed and dispensed in England. Data excludes prescriptions prescribed in hospitals or dental practices.

Drugs No limit on drugs

Patient year of birth Patient year of birth data in this request is derived from information provided to NHSBSA by the NHS Personal Demographics Service (PDS). NHSBSA does not hold up to date information from PDS as the exchange of information and updating of records takes time and should be considered incomplete. In particular PDS details held by NHSBSA may not have been updated for up to 12 months. Typically they are likely to be most up to date in the months following a patients birthday. PDS information presented here reflects the most recent updates that NHSBSA has on record. This means for example, if a patient's records indicated a new address in April 2019, their data from 2018 will be reported against the geographic details of the address that became known in April 2019.
Datasets including PDS data may not be replicable in future after updates to PDS data take place.
Users should also be aware that there may be an additional indefinite data lag between a change in patients circumstances and NHS records being updated. Where PDS data is not held the patient’s DOB (Date Of Birth) from their most recent EPS (Electronic Prescription Service) is used.

Patient data Data is limited to where an NHS Number was recorded during NHSBSA processing and a Patient DOB is held using the method described, further limited to where patient DOB was not after 31 December 2023. Within this dataset 98.2% of items had an NHS number and DOB not after 31 December 2023 recorded.