Frequently Asked Questions

The figures on pharmacydata are from official NHS sources, and are the most recent data that is available. For NHS payments to pharmacies for prescriptions and services, these will typically be 3 months behind the current date, since this is when pharmacies are paid for those. However, this does vary slightly between the different nations. Additionally, Scotland only releases data quarterly, so the figures can be up to 6 months behind the current date.

The most recent data that we have available is shown below:

For market share information, some GP surgeries on pharmacydata will show as having dispensed some of their own prescriptions, e.g. Atherstone Surgery.

The GP surgery is a dispensing doctors site, with an in-house dispensary serving some of the surgery's patients. They will be dispensing prescriptions in a similar way to a pharmacy. For more information, see the Dispensing Doctors' Association website.

On pharmacydata, for English pharmacies, we display the number of prescription items done by the pharmacy each month as 2 different values:

• Items, which is the number of prescription items paid by NHSBSA.
• Professional fees, which is the total of the number of fees for prescription items paid by NHSBSA.

These 2 figures represent different things. For example, a prescription for 24 x 200ml bottles of Fortisip mixed flavours will count as 1 item. However, if the pharmacy dispenses and claims for 5 different flavours, then this will count as 5 professional fees. The total number of items will therefore generally be less than the number of professional fees.

By default, we use the items figure to compare different pharmacies, because this is a more accurate representation of the number of prescriptions dispensed and therefore more useful for comparing how many patients or dispensing is done by different pharmacies. On a pharmacy's profile page on pharmacydata, you can see figures for professional fees by clicking on the "Items" toggle above the graph of item numbers over time.

Yes; we can provide a custom report in a spreadsheet format for specific data requests. Custom reports are priced at £150. Previous custom reports have included:

• List of 100 hour pharmacies in England (name, address, owner details) with average monthly dispensed items, nearest competitor and average monthly dispensed items of nearest competitor
• List of Distance Selling Pharmacies in England including name, address, owner details, average monthly dispensed items, average monthly services figures
• List of pharmacies and average monthly GP CPCS consultations
• List of pharmacies which dispense a specific formulation of medicine in a specified month, with number of prescriptions and total volume of that medicine

If you're interested in requesting a custom report, please contact us. Once you let us know your requirements, we can produce a free sample report which includes the first 10 rows of the data, and an indication of how many rows will be in the full report. If you confirm that you'd like to proceed, then we supply the full report and invoice by email.