Request

I would like to request a re-run of a previous Freedom of Information request which you have kindly responded to. I would like to make a new request under the Freedom of Information Act, for the following data:

The reference number for the previous request is 02225 and we would like a re-run of this for the latest data, i.e. for the month of August 2024.

Response

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

The NHSBSA does hold the requested information; however, we estimate that the cost of compliance with the request would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

We estimate that the cost of complying with your request at this time would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving, extracting and checking the information.

We have determined that the cost of compliance would exceed the non-central government limit for the following reasons:

• While the information for the month of August 2024 is held by the NHSBSA, it is not held in an accessible format. • Pharmacists formally submit their electronic prescriptions in the 6 days after month end and also bundle up their paper prescriptions and send them to the NHSBSA for scanning and putting through an OCR engine. Once everything is in an electronic format it is validated, sent back for clarifications where required, and then it all goes through the pricing engine and finally uploaded into the data warehouse (we then refer to it as "processed"). This process takes approximately 7 weeks.

The NHSBSA is therefore unable to answer any FOI requests relating to this data before it is processed.

Advice and assistance

The NHSBSA publishes a data release calendar, available from the following link Data release calendar | NHSBSA, which indicates when information is planned to be available.

In line with this published schedule, we would therefore advise that you resubmit your request after 21 October 2024.

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-02303