The PSNC has published the list today of Price Concessions for November 2017. The list is the biggest yet, at 91 lines. We’ve taken a first stab at calculating the estimated effect for CCGs, using September 2017 prescribing data. The Google Sheet can be found here. (edit) – the Google Sheet now also contains national calculations per […]
Price concessions data for CCGs, including October 2017 estimate
We have been writing a lot recently about the effect of price concessions on the NHS primary care drugs bill, and on the problems community pharmacy are facing. We’ve been asked for some CCG-level data, and so here it is; both for the confirmed data for April-September 2017, and for an estimate for October, which […]
Getting the data for the Drug Tariff tool (*sigh*)
Today we’ve released our new Drug Tariff viewer. It was a dataset that we previously didn’t hold, but thought that it would be useful to turn into a graphical viewer for people to use to see how the reimbursement price on drugs changes over time, and also to use as the basis of the effect that […]
New interactive OpenPrescribing tool: Explore Changes in the Drug Tariff (and out of stock medicines) back to 2010!
The Drug Tariff, published on behalf of the Department of Health and updated monthly, is a strange and mysterious document, written largely in legalese, and understood by pharmacists and almost no-one else. Ask a GP where they find out the cost of the drug, and they’ll say either their computer system or the BNF. For pharmacists, […]
Drug shortages and “Price Concessions” – how much is it costing the NHS?
There has been an interesting and concerning story in The Times today regarding shortages on a number of commonly-used medicines and a corresponding increase in the costs. Here at OpenPrescribing we have been taking a look at these data as well, and trying to estimate to the cost to the NHS this year. As the […]
OpenPrescribing – new measures now available
We’ve been spending some time at OpenPrescribing designing a set of new measures to identify interesting variations in prescribing behaviour across the country. We’ve talked to people from CCGs, and have looked (via Freedom of Information requests) at a number of CCG schemes for improving prescribing, and have come up with a number of areas […]