NHS IC - Prescription Cost Analysis 2008 - 21 April 2008

Source

• Prescription Cost Analysis 2008. Note on incorrect data (0.06MB)
• Prescription Cost Analysis 2008. Report (5.74MB)
• Prescription Cost Analysis 2008. Glossary (0.07MB)
• Prescription Cost Analysis 2008. Tables (1.53MB)

Key Facts

• Prescription Cost Analysis (PCA) provides details of the number of items and the net ingredient cost of all prescriptions dispensed in the community in England. The drugs dispensed are listed alphabetically within chemical entity by British National Formulary (BNF) therapeutic class
• incorrect data has been captured for a few products; please refer to the “Note on Incorrect data” file on the web page.

Summary

The 2008 data are provided from the links above in two formats:

•   Portable Document Format (PDF)
•   downloadable spreadsheet – Excel 5 or later version, or Excel 5 in zipped format

In the PDF file, the number of prescription items dispensed for individual preparations, dressings or appliances is rounded to the nearest 100. There are a very large number of preparations/dressings/appliances where less than 50 items were dispensed in 2008. While accounting for just over 40 per cent of the total number of preparations dispensed, such preparations covered 0.01 per cent of the total items dispensed. In order, therefore, to keep the publication to a manageable size, such preparations have been excluded.

The Excel file also excludes data on products where less than 50 prescription items were dispensed and aggregating data for individual products may not produce the actual totals.

The Excel file therefore includes these totals for the following 6 levels of aggregation:

• chemical entity
• BNF sub paragraph
• BNF paragraph
• BNF section
• BNF chapter
• overall total

The data in the file for prescription numbers, cost and quantity are given to the nearest hundred. We would recommend that any data extracted for use is presented to the nearest thousand.

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