What is the difference between items and quantity?

Items count how many times a product was prescribed and dispensed — one item is one line on one prescription form, whatever the pack size. Quantity is the total amount supplied (tablets, millilitres, grams). Items are the fair way to compare how often medicines are supplied; quantity is only comparable within one product.

What is net ingredient cost (NIC)?

Net ingredient cost is the basic list price of the drug from the Drug Tariff or manufacturer, before discounts, dispensing fees or adjustments. Actual cost is NIC after the average national discount, and is the closest figure to what the NHS actually paid.

Why is the latest month not the current month?

NHS prescribing data is published roughly two months in arrears, so the most recent month shown here is always a little behind the calendar. Figures are never estimated to fill the gap.

Where does the data come from?

From the NHS Business Services Authority open data (including Prescription Cost Analysis), reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Every figure is summed from the published monthly records, never estimated or interpolated.

Methodology

What the numbers mean

Prescribing and dispensing data count several different things. Mixing them up is the commonest way to misread NHS medicines figures, so every page on this site says exactly which measure it shows.

Items: The number of times a product appeared on a prescription and was dispensed. One item is one line on one form, whatever the quantity. Items are the fairest measure of how often something is supplied.
Quantity: The total amount supplied, in the unit of the pack (tablets, millilitres, grams). Useful within a single presentation, not comparable across different medicines.
Net ingredient cost (NIC): The basic price of the drug before discounts, dispensing fees or adjustments — the list price from the Drug Tariff or the manufacturer.
Actual cost: NIC after the average national discount is applied. It is usually a little below NIC and is the closest figure to what the NHS actually paid for the drug. Where we show a single cost, it is actual cost in pounds.

How figures are built

National and regional totals are sums of the underlying monthly records — we never estimate or interpolate. If a figure cannot be computed from the published data, we leave it out rather than guess. Derived measures (year-on-year change, share of a total, rank) are rounded sensibly; we do not imply more precision than the source supports.

To keep pages fast we precompute monthly totals per organisation and per medicine when each month is imported, and read those summaries on the page. The full record-level data sits behind them for drill-down.

Different datasets count different populations, so figures are not interchangeable. The Prescription Cost Analysis (our national medicines figures) covers all prescriptions dispensed in the community in England. The English Prescribing Dataset we hold powers the dispensing-practice pages and covers GP practices that dispense — a subset, not the whole country — so a practice total and a national PCA total are not expected to reconcile. Hospital figures (FP10HP) and secondary-care medicines (SCMD, indicative cost) are different again. We label each page with its source so the comparison is always like-for-like.

Imports and validation

Each dataset is imported one month at a time. A month is staged in full, reconciled against the publisher's row count, and checked against a sane band of the recent trailing median before it is allowed to replace the live month in a single transaction. A month that fails any check is rolled back and never shown, so a part-imported month cannot leak onto the site. Coverage for every dataset is listed on the data sources page.

Caveats worth knowing

NHS prescribing data is published with roughly a two-month lag, so the latest month here is never the current calendar month.
The English Prescribing Data on this site is scoped to dispensing practices, which is the subject of these pages; full GP-practice prescribing and community pharmacy dispensing are separate datasets we are adding.
Source records are at SNOMED level; we sum them to the BNF presentation so variants of the same product are added together, not overwritten.
Organisation codes change over time as practices merge, open and close. Where a code no longer resolves we say so rather than invent a name.

Common questions

What is the difference between items and quantity?: Items count how many times a product was prescribed and dispensed — one item is one line on one prescription form, whatever the pack size. Quantity is the total amount supplied (tablets, millilitres, grams). Items are the fair way to compare how often medicines are supplied; quantity is only comparable within one product.
What is net ingredient cost (NIC)?: Net ingredient cost is the basic list price of the drug from the Drug Tariff or manufacturer, before discounts, dispensing fees or adjustments. Actual cost is NIC after the average national discount, and is the closest figure to what the NHS actually paid.
Why is the latest month not the current month?: NHS prescribing data is published roughly two months in arrears, so the most recent month shown here is always a little behind the calendar. Figures are never estimated to fill the gap.
Where does the data come from?: From the NHS Business Services Authority open data (including Prescription Cost Analysis), reproduced under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Every figure is summed from the published monthly records, never estimated or interpolated.