Prescribing by GP practice

Go to practice level prescribing data for:

In his letter to cabinet ministers on 7 July 2011, the Prime Minister restated the commitment to make available "prescribing data by GP practice by December 2011".

This data was released for the first time on 14 December 2011, and provided information relating to September 2011. Data for subsequent months will be released monthly thereafter.This data release is under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Covering all general practices in England, the data includes figures on the number of prescription items that are dispensed each month and information relating to costs.

What information is being made available?

  • All prescribed and dispensed medicines (by chemical name), dressings and appliances (at section level) are listed for each GP practice.
  • For each GP practice, the total number of items that were prescribed and then dispensed is shown.
  • The total Net Ingredient Cost and the total Actual Cost of these items is shown.

This data does not list each individual prescription and does not contain any patient identifiable data.

Using and interpreting the data

Practice prescribing data requires careful interpretation, and the information should not be looked at in isolation.

This data can be used to construct comparators of practice prescribing, for example some of the Quality Innovation Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) measures of prescribing. Details of these can be found on our Prescribing Comparators (including QIPP comparators) page.

Accessing the data

Each month a file of practice prescribing data will be made available in CSV format. Due to the large size of each monthly dataset (over 4 million rows), it will be necessary for data users to analyse the information using specialist data-handling software. Standard spreadsheet applications will not be able to handle the volumes of data contained in the monthly datasets.

Practices are identified in the prescribing datasets by their national code. Supplementary file(s) will contain further practice identifiers, such as names and addresses. This supplementary information can be linked to the prescribing dataset using the national practice code.

What does the data cover?

General practice prescribing data is a list of all medicines, dressings and appliances that are prescribed and dispensed each month. A record will only be produced when this has occurred and there is no record for a zero total. For each practice in England, and for each medicine (by chemical name), dressing and appliance, the following information is presented:

  • the total number of items prescribed and dispensed
  • the total net ingredient cost
  • the total actual cost

The data covers NHS prescriptions written in England and dispensed in the community in the UK. Prescriptions written in England but dispensed outside England are included. The data includes prescriptions written by GPs and other non-medical prescribers (such as nurses and pharmacists) who are attached to GP practices.

GP practices are identified only by their national code, so an additional data file - linked to the first by the practice code - provides further detail in relation to the practice.

A sample for each of these files is available to download below:

Are all practices included?

All practices in England are included in this data. The practices listed include all registered practices in England, and also a number of ‘dummy' practices created by PCTs to identify prescribing in certain environments or circumstances (including: specialist clinics, hospices, prisons, training units, etc.)

What period does the data cover?

On 14 December 2011 the data relating to September 2011 was released. Data for subsequent months will be released on a monthly basis (e.g. Feburary 2012 data is expected to be released on 31 May 2012).

Note: Due to the large file size (over 500MB) standard spreadsheet applications will not be able to handle the volumes of data contained in the monthly datasets. Data users will need to analyse the information using specialist data-handling software.

GP practice prescribing data - September 2011

Released 14 December 2011

NOTE: The address file for September 2011 released on 14 December contained erroneous information in the 7th column (the one prior to the postcode) for approximately 3,000 of the 10,000 practices in the file. We are not aware of any other problems with the original file. This error has been corrected and the file replaced on 13 January 2012.

GP practice prescribing data - October 2011

Released 31 January 2012

GP practice prescribing data - November 2011

Released 29 February 2012

GP practice prescribing data - December 2011

Released 30 March 2012

GP practice prescribing data - January 2012

Released 30 April 2012