We have created a new interactive tool for exploring the national Prescribing Cost Analysis (PCA) data, allowing you to investigate prescribing trends over 19 years from 1998 to 2016.

We’ve done a huge amount of hard work to make this tool simple and easy. For example, lots of drug names have changed over time, treatments have moved between Chapters of the BNF, or been assigned new codes. We have “normalised” the data (by hand!) to take account of all this, so we can show each drug according to its current position in the latest BNF dictionary. We have also taken account of changes in national population, and even corrected all prescribing costs to 2016 pounds sterling!

More detail can be found in our blog post about this tool here, and there is a video demonstration to help you get started. We hope you find this useful and would welcome any feedback on this new feature!

Measures Update

Given the recent reductions in price of pregabalin we have modified the measure so that it now shows the total number of prescription items per 1000 patients, rather than the costs. This gives a more meaningful picture of change over time.

You can look at the measure for all CCGs here.

Open_Prescribing, open to all!

We were really pleased to see data obtained from OpenPrescribing.net used in a recent BBC report. We are committed to making access to healthcare information more transparent and impactful in the real world. Our interactive tools aren’t just designed for GPs and pharmacists, but also patients, journalists and anyone who’s interested in exploring and improving healthcare.

If you’d like to sign up for personalised prescribing alerts from individual CCG or practice pages please follow the links.

Prescribing data update

We’ve updated OpenPrescribing with August’s data. Head over to OpenPrescribing to see more.

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