Request

Please provide data on the Hypertension Case Finding Service delivered in England since the service was introduced. Please break this down by year of birth and show the number of patients who received the initial blood pressure check and the number who went on to receive ambulatory blood pressure monitoring ABPM Please present the data in a table with columns Year of Birth, Number of Initial Checks, and Number of ABPMs

Response

I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds the information you have requested and a copy of the information and notes explaining it is attached.

Please read the below notes to ensure correct understanding of the data.

NHS Prescription Services process prescriptions for Pharmacy Contractors, Appliance Contractors, Dispensing Doctors and Personal Administration with information then used to make payments to pharmacists and appliance contractors in England for prescriptions dispensed in primary care settings (other arrangements are in place for making payments to Dispensing Doctors and Personal Administration). This involves processing over 1 billion prescription items and payments totalling over £9 billion each year. The information gathered from this process is then used to provide information on costs and trends in prescribing in England and Wales to over 25,000 registered NHS and Department of Health and Social Care users.

Data Source

The data source was the NHSBSA Information Services Data Warehouse.

Time Period

Data limited to MYS Hypertension claims for assessments between 01 October 2021 and 31 December 2024

Patient Age

Patient age has been taken from the pharmacy submission for data up to September 2023.
For data from October 2023 we have used recorded date of birth to calculate the age.

Anyone whose age was recorded as greater than 115 or less than 0 has been moved to 'Unknown' category as this is assumed to be a data collection error.

Number of Blood Pressure (BP) and Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) checks

The number of checks is taken from the Manage Your Service (MYS) submissions by pharmacies. A single patient may have more than one check and may have one BP and one ABPM check in the same visit.
Due to lack of patient identifiers in the data from October 2021 to September 2023, it is not possible to identify a unique patient count for these checks.

The NHS community pharmacy hypertension case-finding advanced service specification can be found here:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/advanced-service-specification-nhs-community-pharmacy-hypertension-case-finding-advanced-service/

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-02828

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: “Data Warehouse, NHSBSA Copyright 2025”. 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.