Request

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 , FOI-01900, FOI-01931, FOI-02008, FOI-02060, FOI-02143 and FOI-02299.

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) https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-01931 (January 2024 - March 2024) https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02008 (April 2024) https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02060 (May 2024) https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02143 (June 2024) https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02299 (July 2024 - August 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 September 2024 and October 2024 please?

Response

September Data

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 from the below link:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-02381

Please see the following link to view the section 21 in full – https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/36/section/21

October Data

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 October 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 19 December 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-02428

Your personal details will be removed from the published response.