Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

‘I’d like to make an FOI request for pharmaceutical product prescribing data by all Trusts or hospital pharmacy purchasing points in England for the last twelve months, including homecare usage and hospital usage, as this data is not found on the NHSBSA homepage. The pharmaceutical products of interest are: Levocarnitine sugar free alcohol paediatric solution thirty%. Pack sizes twenty ml, forty ml and fifty ml bottles. Levocarnitine paediatric solution thirty%. Pack sizes twenty ml and forty ml bottles.’

On 4 November 2024 you clarified your request as follows:

‘Many thanks for the link to SCMD. We already use it and understand that data provided shows 'The dispensed units are simply units dispensed by the hospital pharmacies – could be to a patient for inpatient/outpatient use or to a ward. The data shows aggregate activity from hospital pharmacies – it’s not patient level and as such caution should applied for any predictions that require patient level analysis'

We would like to understand how and where prescriptions written by Trust and sent to homecare provider gets recorded? That would help us to understand the “homecare usage” for the product.

Can you please advise if what you are offering - “We can provide the items and quantity for the pack sizes mentioned when prescribed in a hospital and dispensed in the community.”- does this data sit within PCA?

Or is PCA strictly all prescriptions items dispensed in the community written by GPs and other authorised prescribers such as nurses, dentists, and allied health professionals.

As we already use PCA and SCMD to gather product prescription data, we can not find where prescriptions issued by Trusts for homecare dispensing is recorded.’

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your clarified request on 4 November 2024.

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

Our response

I am writing to advise you that following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by the NHS Business Services Authority.

Advice and assistance

We do not hold homecare data.

The PCA data includes hospital items dispensed in the community. However, this data is at ICB level so you cannot see how much of it originated from a hospital, additionally there is no pack level data.

The below link shows how much of the PCA data is attributed to hospital prescribing dispensed in the community:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/hospital-prescribing-dispensed-in-the-community