Request

You asked us:

‘Many thanks for this information, I wonder if it is possible for the information to be broken down a little further. I am interested in knowing from the data provided, which prescriber type has issued those prescriptions and therefore request the following information:

a dataset that separates out the number of each drug within each quarter by who the prescriber was i.e. community practitioner nurse and nurse independent.’

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 24 June 2024.

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

Our response

We have considered this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA 2000) and are issuing a refusal notice under section 17 of the FOIA.

The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however, we consider that this information is exempt from disclosure under section 21 of FOIA. This provides an exemption from the duty to disclose information where this is reasonable accessible to an applicant by other means.

This information is already available in the public domain and can be accessed via the dataset from your previous FOI:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01945

Please see the following link to view the section 21 in full - Freedom of Information Act 2000 (legislation.gov.uk)

Advice and assistance

The requested data can be generated by opening FOI-01945 and creating a PivotTable in Excel. For guidance on how to create a PivotTable, please see the following link:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/insert-a-pivottable-18fb0032-b01a-4c99-9a5f-7ab09edde05a

You need rows: Quarter, Prescriber Sub Type, BNF Presentation and Values as Sum of Items. This will provide the number of items for each presentation split by the two prescriber types per quarter.