Thank you for your request for information about the following:

‘I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information from the NHS Business Services Authority. Please can you provide me with:

• Data on the number of people who paid for at least 12 prescriptions at £9.15 per prescription in the 2021/2022 financial year.

• Data on how many people in the 2021/2022 financial period bought or had an active PPC (total and individual figures for 3-month and 12-month PPC’s)?

• The average number of prescriptions purchased by people who paid for 12 or more prescriptions in the 2021/22 financial year.

• The average number of prescriptions purchased by people overall in the 2021/2022 financial year.

If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under the Section 16 obligations of the Act, as to how I can refine my request further for clarity. If you have any questions, please do get in touch and let me know. Thanks in advance.

On 9 November 2022 you clarified your request as follows

Question 1 – In April 2021 the prescription charge increased to £9.35. Are you interested in all prescriptions paid for per item or just those where they have paid the previous rate?

This would be all prescriptions paid for per item please.

Question 3 and 4 – We don’t hold averages, we can provide the number of patients who have individually paid for 12 or more items (probably same answer as Q1) and the number of prescription items they received, and the total number of all patients and the number of prescription items they received. Can you please confirm whether this is acceptable.

Okay, then the alternative you’ve suggested is acceptable, thank you.’

Your request was received on 2 November 2022 and has been dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Response

A copy of the information is attached.

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 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.

Data Source

Information Services Data warehouse

Exclusions

• 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

Financial year 2021/2022

The data provided is for prescriptions dispensed in England and is limited to prescriptions where we were able to identify the patient.

Items

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

"Patients with a chargeable px"

The number of patients who received at least one chargeable prescription in the year

"Chargeable items"

The number of prescription items received in the year which are held as chargeable in our database

"Patients with 12 or more chargeable px"

The number of patients who received 12 or more chargeable prescription items in the year

"Chargeable items for patients with 12 or more chargeable px"

The number of chargeable prescription items received by patients who received 12 or more chargeable prescription items in the year.

Pre-payment certificates

Please note that where a patient holds a valid pre-payment certificate the prescription items are held as 'exempt' in our database, these items are excluded from this request.

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 97.36% of prescription items.

The patient count figures are based on a distinct count of NHS number as captured from the prescription image.

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.

Question two

Figures have been provided for both ‘PPCs Bought’ and ‘PPCs Active’ during the financial year 2021/2022.

The figures for ‘PPCs Bought’ do not include those PPCs that were issued for free by the NHSBSA.

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: “Information Services Datawarehouse, 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.