The pharmacy opening and closures data set shows the numbers of pharmacies in England that are included on a Pharmaceutical List held by NHS England on the last calendar day of each month, and so can provide NHS prescriptions and pharmaceutical services. These are split into three groups by the number of premises in each pharmacy group: Small (1-5), Medium (6-99) and Large (100+) pharmacy groups. This data set also separately includes figures for pharmacies subject to the 100 hours condition and distance selling pharmacies.
Pharmacies which have changed ownership will be counted as a closure with a new pharmacy opening on the next day, however this doesn’t affect the net change figures. ‘Opened’ means pharmacies that have joined a Pharmaceutical List and started providing NHS services between the first and last calendar day of the month; and ‘closed’ means pharmacies that have been removed from a list and have ceased providing NHS services between first and last calendar day of the month.
Data is as accurate as the data held by the NHSBSA data warehouse at the time of publishing each month. Total figures may not agree month to month due to openings and closures resulting in pharmacies changing group size or where backdated amendments are made.
This dataset differs from the General Pharmaceutical Services (GPhS) official statistics publication as the two publications count the number of pharmacies included in a Pharmaceutical List in two different ways. The GPhS publication presents active pharmacies as those which submitted prescriptions to the NHSBSA for processing across a whole year. That methodology used for the GPhS publication differs from the methodology used for this dataset which is set out above, so we would not expect the two to be comparable.
We publish the related dataset Consolidated Pharmaceutical List on a quarterly basis.
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