Request

You asked us:

As a Freedom of Information request, please provide the following information.

1. How many under 18s have been prescribed antidepressants? Please provide annual totals for each year September to August inclusive. Please provide totals broken down into the following age brackets - 0-5 years, 6-11 years and 12-17 years.

2. If possible, please provide the reasons given for these prescriptions and the number of prescriptions given for each reason.

3. Of these prescriptions, please provide a breakdown of how many were prescribed by a GP without an psychiatric assessment.

4. For each year, please provide the youngest age prescribed an antidepressant.

Please break down the data for each year and into the following age brackets 0-5, 6-12 years old and 13-18 years old.

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 20 October 2025.

On 11 November 2025, you clarified that:

If possible, please provide data for the last five years.

Please use these age groups:

• 0–5 years

• 6–11 years

• 12–17 years

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 NHSBSA holds some of the information you requested.

Question 1

1. How many under 18s have been prescribed antidepressants? Please provide annual totals for each year September to August inclusive. Please provide totals broken down into the following age brackets - 0-5 years, 6-11 years and 12-17 years.

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.

NHSBSA

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 one 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: ePACT2

Data in ePACT2 is sourced from the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) Data Warehouse and is derived from products prescribed on prescriptions and dispensed in the Community. The data captured from prescription processing is used to calculate reimbursement and remuneration. It includes items prescribed in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Guernsey/Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man which have been dispensed in the community in England. English prescribing that has been dispensed in Wales, Scotland, Guernsey/Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man is also included.

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.

Time period:

September 2020-August 2021 September 2021-August 2022

September 2022 to August 2023

September 2023 to August 2024

September 2024 to August 2025

Organisation data:

The data is limited to patients who have received items prescribed in England and dispensed anywhere in the UK.

Data:

The data includes a count of unique identified patients under the age of 18, who have been prescribed one or more item included within BNF Section 0403 (Antidepressants). The data is aggregated annually between September to August and split into defined age bands of 0-5, 6-11 and 12-17.

Patient identification:

Where patient identifiable figures have been reported they are based on the information captured during the prescription processing activities. Please note, patient details cannot be captured from every prescription form and based on the criteria used for this analysis, patient information (NHS number) was only available for 99.20% of prescription items.

The patient count figures are based on distinct counts of NHS numbers as captured from prescription images.

Patient ages are based on the age as captured from the prescription image and relates to the patient's age at the time of prescribing/dispensing. Results have been restricted to only show results for patients aged 17 and under with results presented by age band (0-5, 6-11, 12-17).

The figures for the number of identifiable patients should not be combined and reported at any other level than provided as this may result in the double-counting of patients. For example, a single patient could appear in the results for multiple time periods.

Data quality:

NHS Prescription Services have a variety of validation streams throughout prescription processing to support accurate capture of the data. In addition, a retrospective sample is completed in the month following reimbursement to identify the accuracy of prescription processing information. The check includes the accuracy of prescriber, practice and drug information, but does not include the personal details of the patient. The information is used to populate a number of key performance indicators, the results of which are published each month on our website at:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/pharmacies-gp-practices-and-appliance-contractors/payments-and-pricing/how-we-process-prescriptions

We stores information on the age of the recipient of each prescription as it was read by computer from images of paper prescriptions or as attached to messages sent through the electronic prescription system.

We does not validate, verify or manually check the resulting information as part of the routine prescription processing. However, an additional check is carried out on a yearly basis to check the capture rate and accuracy of the stored patient information. The results of this check for the most recent period available (January 2020 to December 2020) show that for both paper and electronic prescriptions patient age was captured from 94.88% of prescription forms and the accuracy of age data captured was 99.95%.

There are some data quality issues with the ages of patients requested in this FOI. The NHSBSA holds prescription images for 18 months. A sample of the data was compared to the images of the paper prescription forms from which the data was generated where these images are still available. These checks revealed issues in the reliability of age data in particular the quality of the stored age data was poor for patients recorded as aged 2 years and under. When considering the accuracy of age data, it is expected that a small number of prescriptions may be allocated against any given patient age incorrectly.

The figures provided for the lowest patient age should therefore not be reported as fact.

Questions 2 and 3

2. If possible, please provide the reasons given for these prescriptions and the number of prescriptions given for each reason.

3. Of these prescriptions, please provide a breakdown of how many were prescribed by a GP without an psychiatric assessment.

I am writing to advise you that following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested for is not held. This is because we do not capture the clinical reason why a drug has been prescribed, and medication may be prescribed for reasons outside of its primary use.

Question 4

4. For each year, please provide the youngest age prescribed an antidepressant.

The youngest patient receiving an antidepressant prescription is under one year old for every year of data provided.

There are some data quality issues with the ages of patients prescribed the products requested in this FOI. The NHSBSA holds prescription images for 18 months. A sample of the data was compared to the images of the paper prescription forms from which the data was generated where these images are still available. These checks revealed issues in the reliability of age data. When considering the accuracy of age data, it is expected that a small number of prescriptions may be allocated against any given patient age incorrectly.

The figures provided for the lowest patient age should therefore not be reported as fact.

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-03290

Your personal details will be removed from the published response.