Request

Dear Sirs, The NHSBSA makes payments for Covid-19 vaccinations to Primary Care Network (PCN) providers in England. May I request the following data, separated per administration month, starting from December 2020 to April 2022, in excel format:

Column 1 Year/month

Column 2 ODS Code for PCN

Column 3 ICS Code for the PCN

Column 4 ICS Name for the PCN

Column 5 Number of vaccines administered by the PCN

Column 6 Total Payment made for administration of these Covid-19 vaccinations

Column 7 Total of ALL other miscellaneous payments relating to Covid-19 vaccinations made to PCN.

Thank you.

Response

The NHSBSA currently does not hold ICS information. This information will become available from next month.

The NHSBSA calculates payments for COVID-19 vaccinations to pharmacies and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) in England.

COVID-19 vaccination data is keyed in via Point of Care (POC) Systems and then transferred to the NHSBSA’s Manage Your Service (MYS) application.

Each month, vaccine providers submit claims to request payment based on the data that has been transferred into MYS. To be paid in a timely fashion such claims must be submitted during a specified declaration submission period. Should claims be submitted outside the time windows, payments will be made later. This means that in some cases there is a difference between the number of vaccines that have been 'claimed' and the number that have been 'paid'.

Both the number of 'claimed' and 'paid' vaccinations have been reported in this request.

When considering the nature of the vaccine data there are several ways it can be reported over time:

Administration Month - This is the month in which the vaccine was administered to the patient.

Payment Month - This is the month in which the payment was made to the dispenser of the vaccine.

Note that all payments for Pharmacies are paid one month later than those for PCN lead practice providers.

Keying Month - This is the month in which the vaccine record first appeared on the MYS system.

Submission/Claim Month - This is the month in which the claim for payment for a vaccination occurred.

For example, suppose that a practice patient is given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month) and then the paper record of this is misplaced for a while. The record is found and keyed into a POC system during February (Keying Month). The Provider is allowed to claim for keying during February in the first 5 days of March, but they're a little late and authorise the claim on the 7 of March (Submission Month). As the claim is outside the submission window it is not paid in March, it will instead be paid during April (Payment Month).

Another example could be a Pharmacy patient given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month), keyed in January (Keying Month), then submitted in February (Submission Month) and then payments are calculated in February, however as this is for a pharmacy the payments are held back and not paid until March (Payment Month).

For the purposes of this request, we have chosen to report by Administration Month.

Data included in this request is limited to vaccinations carried out by PCN Lead Practices only.

The latest data used is a snapshot of the MYS system data that was taken on 8 June 2022. This is the snapshot of data taken after the June submission period that was used to calculate payments.

The data is limited to administration months between December 2020 and April 2022 inclusive.

This payment data does not include any adjustments made by NHSBSA Provider Assurance.

Payments comprise an Item of Service fee and potentially a Supplementary fee. Payments do not relate to the value of the drugs dispensed.

The total used for the payment calculation may not match the totals shown in 'live' POC systems or MYS that continue to receive updates after the snapshot used to calculate payments was taken.

Vaccination records are limited to those which have been associated with a declaration submission. This may include late submission declarations received after the deadline for declarations, such records are not paid for until the next month.

Please note that some vaccinations attract a supplementary fee, so it is not possible to determine the number of vaccinations by dividing the total paid by the basic Item of Service (IoS) fee.

It is possible for new records from old administration months to be entered in the future, thus the totals here for each administration months could change when more data is processed.

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

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-25504

Data Queries

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact nhsbsa.foirequests@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.