Request

Part 1 :
For the most recent month (January 26), per A medicine (see list below), per ICB and nationally:
How many A medicine scripts went to people not getting any B drug in this or the previous 11 months

Part 2
In order to understand what "B" medicine (see list below) patients only receiving an "A" medicine in the current month were previously taking, I would like to know the following:

Of the A scripts that went to people not getting B in the current month, but who DID have a B script in the previous 11 months: what were the number of B scripts in each of those previous months, for each "A" BNFID.
The "B" scripts could be aggregated to BNF_CHEMICAL_SUBSTANCE or reported at BNFID level if easier.

I am requesting this at national level for January 26.

I understand that these results will not be able to be summed and that the information on Drug B for people getting more than one "A" medicine in the month will feature twice.

Part 3
I would like to know the number of unique patients getting more than one medicine from List A in January 26.

Part 4
I would also like to know the unique patient count for each row in part 2, at national level

Part 5
If possible, I would also like parts 2 and 4 at ICB level.

List A: medicines with the following BNFID prefixes
0601023AB
0601023AI
0601023AQ
0601023AS
0601023AW
0601023AZ
0601023Y0

List B: medicines with any of the following BNFID prefixes
0601011 (7‑digit)
0601012 (7‑digit)
0601021 (7‑digit)
0601022 (7‑digit)
0601040 (7‑digit)
0601023B (8‑digit)
0601023I (8‑digit)
0601023R (8‑digit)
0601023S (8‑digit)
0601023U (8‑digit)
0601023V (8‑digit)
0601023W (8‑digit)
0601023X (8‑digit)
0601023Z (8‑digit)
0601023A0 (9‑digit)
0601023AA (9‑digit)
0601023AC (9‑digit)
0601023AD (9‑digit)
0601023AE (9‑digit)
0601023AF (9‑digit)
0601023AG (9‑digit)
0601023AH (9‑digit)
0601023AJ (9‑digit)
0601023AK (9‑digit)
0601023AL (9‑digit)
0601023AM (9‑digit)
0601023AN (9‑digit)
0601023AP (9‑digit)
0601023AR (9‑digit)
0601023AU (9‑digit)
0601023AV (9‑digit)
0601023AX (9‑digit)
0601023AY (9‑digit)

Response

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 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244/contents/made 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 January of 2026 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 https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/data-release-calendar, 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 20 March 2026.

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: “NHSBSA Copyright 2026”. 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.