Request

I would like to make a Freedom of Information Request regarding the SSP data you hold for community pharmacy contractors.

Would you be able to share with me, broken down by month, pharmacy contractor and by drug, which drugs or category of drugs the SSP fees listed apply to?

This would be for each month between August 2019 to August 2022.

Please let me know if it would be possible to request this data for this time frame.

Response

Please note earliest SSP raised was on October 19.

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

The data source was the NHSBSA Information Services Data Warehouse.

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.

Please note data for drugs flagged in our database as Schedule 2 and 3 controlled drugs have been excluded from this dataset for information security reasons to prevent the identification of organisations with high levels of controlled drug dispensing.

Organisation Data

Only items that were dispensed in the community in England have been included

Time Period

August 2019 to August 2022 inclusive

Drugs

Limited to items where a Serious Shortage Protocol (SSP) payment was made Note that the drugs given are those dispensed, we do not hold data on which drug was prescribed for items where an SSP payment was made

Drugs are given with their dictionary of medicines and devices (DM+D) DM+D Pack description, for further information on DM+D Pack description names please see the section of the NHSBSA website

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/pharmacies-gp-practices-and-appliance-contractors/dictionary-medicines-and-devices-dmd

Note that there is no record of which SSP each item was claimed against. A list of the SSPs can be found on the NHSBSA website.

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/pharmacies-gp-practices-and-appliance-contractors/serious-shortage-protocols-ssps

Prescription data accuracy

For detailed explanation of data accuracy please see the NHSBSA website

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/pharmacies-gp-practices-and-appliance-contractors/payments-and-pricing/how-we-process-prescriptions#:~:text=Prescription%20Processing%20Payment%20Accuracy%20(PPPA)&text=to%20dispensing%20contractors.-,It%20measures%20the%20number%20of%20items%20sampled%20that%20were%20processed,should%20be%20processed%20financially%20accurate.

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

https://opendata.nhsbsa.net/dataset/foi-29890