Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Request

Please provide the number of items dispensed in the community and the number of patients split by Year of Birth between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2024. Exclude hospital and dental prescribing. Include only items prescribed and dispensed in England.

Note: I previously submitted this request under FOI-02826. However, the data provided included patient counts by Age, which appeared to result in duplicated patient numbers across multiple ages. To avoid this issue, I am specifically requesting Year of Birth to ensure patient counts are unique and accurately grouped.

Our response

I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds the information you have requested and a copy of the information 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.

Exclusions
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.
• Items supplied as part of a Pharmacy First consultation or service.

Data Source
The data source was the NHSBSA Information Services Data Warehouse.

Time Period
January 2024 - December 2024

Organisation Data
The data provided is for prescriptions prescribed and dispensed in England.

Identified Patients
Prescriptions are only included if an NHS Number has been captured during NHSBSA processing. 99.99% of patients within the limits of this dataset had an NHS Number and date of birth recorded.

Data is presented at national level then broken down by year of birth. Due to unique patient counts returning lower than 5 because of this, the years pre-1912 have been combined to ensure unique patient counts are more than 5.

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.