Request

For the latest full year for which statistics are available, please supply the numbers of prescription items / lines dispensed, analysed by age of patient in the following groups - Under 16, 16-18, 19-59, 60-65,66 and over - and by fee type or exemption, i.e Dispensed for fee Dispensed against pre-paid cert Dispensed under the following exemptions: Age based exemptions Income based benefits Pension Credits Universal Credit Tax Credits Maternity Exemption Medical Exemption Low Income Scheme (HC2/3) War Pension / Armed Forces Comp Scheme Other Exemption Age groups on the x-axis and fee/exemption types on the y-axis, please and thank you. If this level of detail is not available, please provide the greatest level of detail that is available.

Response

A copy of the information is attached.

Time Period: February 2021 to January 2022

NHSBSA 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.

The data provided is limited to items dispensed in England only.

Prescription Charge Exemption Category:

The identification of a prescription as 'chargeable' or 'exempt' is as robust as it can be in terms of the data we hold.

The data that is recorded in relation to the reason for an exemption, referred to as the 'exemption category', is not reliable for the following reasons.

In reality many possible 'reasons' may apply to a specific prescription but only one can be recorded in our data. This is the case even if more than one was indicated by marks on the prescription form.

In a large number of cases the NHSBSA does not record a specific exemption category. A common and increasing reason for our records stating ‘No Declaration/Declaration Not Specific’ is the increasing use of the Real Time Exemption Checking service (RTEC). This service confirms to the dispenser that a person was exempt from the charge, but no record of the reason found by RTEC is passed on to NHSBSA prescription processing systems or data warehouse.

In many cases the mark(s) on the rear of the form intended to indicate one, or more, exemption reason(s) is not clear and can be misinterpreted by the NHSBSA scanners.

NHSBSA performs no validation or verification of which exemption category has been marked or recorded during scanning.

Data Quality for patient ages:

NHSBSA 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.

The NHSBSA 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 time 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%.

Items shows the number of times a product appears on a prescription form not the quantity prescribed.

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 on prescription forms with no recorded age or where the recorded age was unidentified during NHSBSA prescription processing

Please note that this request and our response is published on our Freedom of Information disclosure log at:

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-24396

Data Queries

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data please contact dataandinsightsupport@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact nhsbsa.communicationsteam@nhs.net. 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 Information Services Data Warehouse, NHSBSA Copyright 2022” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

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.