Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

You asked us:

Can you provide me with details for all payments made to GP practices and PCNs in England for administering the COVID-19 vaccine.

Ideally, I would like the following information for each GP practice and PCN: 1. Date of all payments, along with sum of money paid and number of vaccine shots administered.

Date range: 1 June 2020 – 29 September 2024

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 29 September 2024.

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

Our response

I have established that the information you requested is not held by the NHS Business Services Authority. 

This is because the NHSBSA does not directly arrange payment to PCN providers and we do not hold data on payment dates or the exact amounts paid.

This information may be available from NHS England, further information is given below under Advice and Assistance.

Data we do hold

The NHSBSA calculates payments for covid vaccinations to Pharmacies and Primary Care Network (PCN) providers in England.

This means we hold similar data to that you have requested. We have provided the data in the attached file. This includes:

• 'NHSBSA processing month' - the month when the NHSBSA calculated the payment after the submission window had closed.

• 'Number of covid vaccination fees' - the number of doses claimed for

• 'Payment amount (GBP)' - the standard fee payment including the item of service fee and any applicable additional payment due to the circumstances of the payment as described in the relevant enhanced service specification documents.

• 'NHSBSA calculation date for top up' - the date when a top up for a late notice fee change was calculated - see notes below for more information about the 'top up' payments that were applicable to doses between 16 October 2021 and 31 January 2022.

• 'Ancillary Payment Amount GBP' - the amount of the top up payment.

The final payment amounts for each account would have been sent to Primary Care Services England (PCSE) to make the payments as soon as possible after that date.

The use of the term 'payment' in this data relates to claims that have been processed by NHSBSA assigned a fee value and passed on to the relevant payment system.

We do not hold Primary Care Network (PCN) Grouping data to link to the GP Practice Organisation Data Service (ODS) Code. The data provided is therefore broken down by the GP Practice ODS Code that represented its PCN Grouping for the purpose of claiming the fees for covid vaccines.

Data included in this request is limited to vaccinations carried out by PCNs only.

Covid vaccination data is keyed in via Point of Care (POC) Systems and transferred to the NHSBSA Manage Your Service (MYS) application.

Each month, vaccine providers submit claims to request payment based on the data that has been transferred into MYS.

To be paid in a timely fashion such claims must be submitted during a specified declaration submission period.

Should claims be submitted outside the submission period they will be processed in the following period.

Data included in this request is limited to payment processing dates between February 2021 and September 2024.We do not hold data earlier than February 2021.

NHSBSA processing month may include activity from prior months as contractors may submit these claims within a grace period.

This payment data does not include any adjustments made by NHSBSA Provider Assurance as part of post payment verification exercise.

Any adjustments are made at account level and may relate to several months of activity.

This data does not include data for claim submissions made in February 2021 as these were deleted and resubmitted later in order to apply revised fee rates.

In this month there was a clawback of some payments most of these clawbacks are excluded from this report - with the data reported against the resubmission - but during this period there were some manual adjustments that may not all be reflected in the itemised records.

Payments comprise an Item of Service fee and a supplementary fee where applicable. Payments do not relate to the value of the drugs dispensed.

For doses administered between September 2021 and January 2022 there was a range of late notice fee rate changes.

Over that time the pre-established rates were claimed and paid as normal - top up payments were made later in February, March and May 2022 to bring the total paid to that implied by the late notice fee rate changes.

These top ups were calculated separately but they did not require a new submission - so these have been reported against the original submission date for the dose that would have led to the standard payment.

These top up payments are shown as 'Ancillary Payment Amount GBP'.

The total used for the payment calculation may not match the totals shown in 'live' POC systems or MYS that continue to receive updates after the snapshot used to calculate payments was taken.

Vaccination records are limited to those which have been associated with a declaration submission and included in a payment calculation sent to PCSE.

Please note that some vaccinations attract a supplementary fee, so it is not possible to determine the number of vaccinations by dividing the total paid by the basic Item of Service (IoS) fee.

Advice and Assistance 

NHS England may hold some or all of the information you require regarding payments to GPs and PCNs as well as numbers of vaccines administered.

They can be contacted at:

NHS England 

PO Box 16738 

Redditch 

B97 9PT 

Telephone 0300 311 22 33 

Email: england.contactus@nhs.net     

Web http://www.england.nhs.uk/contact-us/foi/  

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-02264

Your personal details will be removed from the published response.

Data Queries

Please contact foirequests@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data.

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: “MYS system, 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.