I am writing to confirm that I have now completed my search for the information which you requested.

Request

You asked us:

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I was wondering if you would be able to develop on top of the FOI Request FOI-01537, FOI-01681, FOI-01795 and FOI-01900.

BNF Chapter 20-22 and Chapter 23:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01537 (April 2023 - September 2023)

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01681 (October 2023 - November 2023)

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01795 (December 2023 - January 2024)

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01900 (February 2024)

The data in these requests were from the data source ‘NHSBSA Information Services Data Warehouse’ with the Columns YEAR_MONTH, PRACTICE_CODE, DISPENSER_CODE, BNF_CHAPTER_CODE, BNF_CODE, PRODUCT_ORDER_NUMBER, PACK_ORDER_NUMBER, EPD_BNF_20_21_22, EPD_BNF_23, AC_FLAG, ENG_PRESC_BNF20_23, NIC_GBP, ITEMS and TOTAL_QUANTITY.

Would it be possible for the data to be limited to prescribing within BNF Chapter 20 - Dressings, Chapter 21 – Appliances and Chapter 22 – Incontinence Appliances, Chapter 23 - Stoma Appliances, limited to England, Wales, Scotland, Guernsey, Alderney, Jersey, and the Isle of Man.

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.

Could we have the same caveats so that the data matches with the English Prescribing Dataset (EPD).

Would it be possible to have the data in the same format for March 2024 please?

Furthermore to this request would it be possible to start publishing this data regularly similar to the BNF SNOMED mapping file?

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 23 July 2024.

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

Our response

Under Section 21 of the FOIA we are not required to provide information in response to a request if it is already reasonably accessible to you.

The information you requested is available on the NHSBSA website https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01931

To filter to the data they specifically ask for they need to use the YEAR_MONTH column to filter to 202403 , the EPD_BNF_20_21_22 to filter to data that would be in the EPD for chapters 20-22, separately they can look at the column EPD_BNF_23 to find data that would be in the EPD for chapter 23.

Alternatively, the EPD_FLAG column filtered to EPD, but there are a small number of items in the dataset that are not in chapters 20-23 so they could exclude any row with null in the column ENG_PRESC_BNF20_23 to get to the same subset of data.

Publishing this response

Please note that this information will be published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02108