OpenPrescribing Hospitals: numbers please!

In the previous post we showed how you can run custom analyses of the variation in the quantities of medicines issued across all NHS trusts in England, as well as NHS trust issuing grouped by ICB, NHS region or nationally.

Charts make it easy to see trends and variation in the issuing of a set of specified products, but sometimes you just want to see the numbers. During our OpenPrescribing Hospitals user testing, we were commonly asked the following questions:

• Which NHS trusts have issued the most of a set of products?
• Are there any NHS trusts not issuing any of a given product?
• How much of a product has been issued in an ICB in the last year?

To help answer questions like this, we include a summary table below the charts in the results section of an analysis. This table shows the total quantity of the selected products issued during different time periods for each chart view. Below is an example of the summary table when in NHS trust mode.

This shows the total issuing across the entire period (January 2019 - June 2025 at the time of writing) for each NHS trust. If any specific trusts are selected for analysis, their total is shown separately. This allows you to quickly see the trusts that are issuing the most of the selected products, and identify any trusts that haven’t issued any of the selected products.

Below is an example of the summary table when in ICB mode, with the total quantity calculated for the latest month (June 2025 at the time of writing). Using this, you can quickly identify the ICBs in which NHS trusts are issuing the most of the selected products.

The above examples highlight the richer analyses at different organisational levels that are now possible with the OpenPrescribing Hospitals Analyse feature. In the next post, we’ll show how the feature supports the analysis of multiple related products. If you have any feedback on the updates or would like to share the results of an interesting analysis, please let us know!