Prescribing

What does your GP practice prescribe?

Every prescription dispensed in England is counted by the practice that wrote it, and the NHS publishes the lot each month. This page finds the GP practices near a postcode and shows what one prescribed in the latest month: how many items and at what cost, the mix by BNF chapter, and the shares of antibiotics, antidepressants, opioids, HRT and other telling groups against England's, with the most prescribed medicines.

  • Items & cost per item
  • Mix by BNF chapter
  • Antibiotics, opioids, HRT vs England
  • Nearest practices

How this works

The NHS Business Services Authority pays pharmacies for what they dispense, and publishes the English Prescribing Dataset a couple of months in arrears: about eighteen million rows a month, one per practice and presentation. This page asks that month’s table for the prescribing cost centres in the postcode’s district and its neighbours, keeps those the NHS Organisation Data Service lists as GP practices, and lists the nearest few. For the chosen practice it sums the month by BNF chapter, by BNF section (which gives the telling groups) and by chemical substance, and does the same for the whole of England to compare shares. Shares are of items rather than patients because the dataset carries no list sizes; an older list means more statins and blood pressure tablets however the practice prescribes, so the comparison says as much about who lives nearby as about the doctors. Dispensing practices, private prescriptions and hospital prescribing are outside the dataset.

Sources

  • NHS Business Services Authority, English Prescribing Dataset (EPD with SNOMED code), monthly. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
  • NHS England Organisation Data Service (ODS) API, for the GP practice role. OGL v3.
  • Postcodes and districts: postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory (OGL v3).