Request

In a follow up to FOI-01909:

‘May I ask how the age breakdown is recorded? If it won’t take me over the time limit for a further FOI request, I’d be grateful for further info on under-17s.’

You subsequently clarified that you wished for the data to be broken down by the following age brackets:

• 00-04

• 05-09

• 10-14

• 15-19

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your clarified request on 11 June 2024.

We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.

Our response

I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds the information you have requested and a copy of the information and notes explaining it 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 one 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 (DHSC) users.

It should be noted that antidepressant drugs are used for indications other than depression, for example migraine, chronic pain, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), or a range of other conditions. Clinical indication isn’t captured by the NHSBSA. Therefore, the data on these drugs do not relate solely to prescribing for depression.

Data Source: ePACT2

Data in ePACT2 is sourced from the NHSBSA Data Warehouse and is derived from products prescribed on prescriptions and dispensed in the community. The data captured from prescription processing is used to calculate reimbursement and remuneration. It includes items prescribed in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Guernsey / Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man which have been dispensed in the community in England. English prescribing that has been dispensed in Wales, Scotland, Guernsey / Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man is also included.

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

Financial Years 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24.

Organisation Data

The data is for prescriptions prescribed in England regardless of where they are dispensed in the community and broken down by eight Integrated Care Boards.

Data

This dataset is limited to the total number of unique patients, aged 19 and under, prescribed BNF section (0403) within the following ICBs:

NHS MID AND SOUTH ESSEX INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS BEDFORDSHIRE, LUTON AND MILTON KEYNES INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS SUFFOLK AND NORTH-EAST ESSEX INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS HERTFORDSHIRE AND WEST ESSEX INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS NORFOLK AND WAVENEY INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS NORTHAMPTONSHIRE INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, OXFORDSHIRE AND BERKSHIRE WEST INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

NHS CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND PETERBOROUGH INTEGRATED CARE BOARD

Age

This data is limited to patients who are aged 19 and under, with the data being presented in four separate age bands: patients aged 0-4, 5-9, 10-14 and 15-19.

Data Quality for patient age: 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 messages 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.

There are some data quality issues with the ages of patients prescribed the products requested in this FOI. The NHSBSA holds prescription images for 18 months. A sample of the data was compared to the images of the paper prescription forms from which the data was generated where these images are still available. These 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.

Patient Identification

Where patient identifiable figures have been reported they are based on the information captured during the prescription processing activities. Please note, patient details cannot be captured from every prescription form and based on the criteria used for this analysis, patient information (NHS number) was only available for 99.53% of prescription items.

The patient count figures are based on a distinct count of NHS number as captured from the prescription image.

The figures for the number of identifiable patients should not be combined and reported at any other level than provided as this may result in the double-counting of patients. For example, a single patient could appear in the results for multiple months.

Data Queries

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.

Reusing the data and copyright

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 2024” 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.