Request

Please tell me how you spent the money allocated for Covid Claims.

I would like to see which pharmacies received money, howe much they received and for what claims.

I would like to know how many and which pharmacies have claimed for contributions in full or in part towards Dispensing Robots, as we were advised that ours was one of several that were going through and I would like to know who was successful with their claim and who was not.

Response

The data held which would allow us to calculate a breakdown of claims made under Part VIA of the Drug Tariff is held at individual claim level. We have been able to locate the claim files which contain the data which categorises claims under the 4 headline categories outlined in the drug tariff. However, although attempts have been made to extract data from each claim, it has proven difficult to consistently do this, due to the format the data has been received by each contractor. Although this was partially successful, we have been unable to extract information on all claims. In all, we were able to extract data from approx. 3,000 records. However there were 10,048 claims in total. In addition, extracting information to identify which claims include reimbursement for the purchase of dispensing robots has proven difficult. In order to establish whether a claim was for dispensing robots, we attempted to ascertain if the word “robot” was mentioned within the claim. Of those that we were able to extract, we have not been able to verify the data extracted. Without doing so we cannot confidently say that the data extracted is in fact the information which we hold. In all, it took 18.5 hours to conduct this exercise.

Therefore, I estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information. Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request and I will not be processing your request further.

High Level Payment Figures

We have disclosed information, under FOI, containing high level payment figures broken down by pharmacy, but without the breakdown by category, and without reference to payments for dispensing robots. Two such datasets are published at the below web link.

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-23358 https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-25450

If this information is of interest to you and you would like any previous additional claim months, please submit a further request.