Frequently Asked Questions

What does beta mean?

The platform is currently in beta, which means it's made available early to allow us to gather feedback and improve the platform. This also allows you to get an early look at the platform and helps us build a community of users to drive the development of the platform.

This does mean that you may encounter occasional issues or features that are still being refined. Please let us know if you encounter any issues or have any feedback.

How can I keep up to date with the platform?

You can sign up to the OpenPrescribing newsletter to receive updates about the platform. See the Contact page for other ways to stay in touch.

Where do you get the data from?

The primary data source for the OpenPrescribing Hospitals platform is the Secondary Care Medicines Dataset (SCMD). The SCMD is collated by Rx-info and hosted on the National Health Service Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) Open Data Portal.

There is detailed user guide provided on the NHSBSA Open Data Portal alongside the data but briefly the SCMD contains processed pharmacy stock control data. Data is collected and curated from individual trusts by Rx-info. Rx-info then shares the data with the NHSBSA who make it openly available.

Other data sources which are linked to the SCMD to provide supplementary detail on the products and organisations within the SCMD, are described on the About page.

How often is it updated?

The SCMD is published monthly by the NHSBSA. Data is published with a 1 month delay, allowing for aggregation and curation of the dataset by Rx-Info prior to publication. The date of each release is available via the NHSBSA. This data is made available on the OpenPrescribing Hospitals platform shortly after publication by the NHSBSA.

New data is initially made available as provisional data (see What is provisional data?). You can check the status of data available for analysis on OpenPrescribing Hospitals using our Submission History page.

What is provisional data?

Monthly data within the SCMD is initially published as provisional data. Provisional data is subject to change as Trusts submitting to the SCMD can update historical issues to reflect actual use. This is known as backtracking and affects 45% of the NHS Trusts submitting data to the SCMD. Backtracking is at its greatest in the most recent 3 months of data. Two months after the close of the financial year - once backtracking is accounted for - data is published as finalised data.

To see the data available or to read more about how it is made available please refer to the NHSBSA Open Data Portal where the SCMD is hosted. Alternatively we provide a summary of the latest data availability on our Submission History page.

What is stock control data?

Stock control data is information collected from hospital pharmacy systems that is used to track and manage medicines use within hospitals. These systems support management of inventory levels, monitoring of medication usage and tracking of costs.

Unlike primary care prescribing data, hospital stock control data is not based on individual patient prescriptions. The data represents medication distribution within hospitals, such as issuing of medicines to wards or clinical areas, rather than actual patient-level prescribing.

Which medicines and devices are included?

All medicines and devices used by NHS Trusts in England with a dm+d code are included.

Which NHS Trusts are included?

The platform includes data from all NHS hospital trusts in England that submit data to Rx-Info. This includes all NHS Acute, Teaching, Specialist, Mental Health and Community Trusts in England (this does not include medications dispensed by community pharmacy but this is available separately).

Why can't I find my hospital on the platform?

There are multiple reasons your hospital may not be present in the data presented. These include:

• Data is reported at the level of individual NHS Trusts. NHS Trusts can be made up of multiple sites. If you can’t find your hospital, try searching for it by it’s NHS Trust name.
• NHS Trusts sometimes undergo organisational change, such as mergers or acquisitions. The hospital you are looking for could be included in the dataset under a different name to what you might expect. Data for NHS Trusts which are now part of another NHS Trust is aggregated into the successor organisation. You can find all NHS Trusts historically included in the SCMD, with an indication of their current NHS Trust on the Submission History page.

Why is data missing for my Trust?

The SCMD dataset relies on submission of pharmacy stock control data by individual NHS Trusts. For some NHS Trusts, submissions are not available for some months or submissions are incomplete. The data completeness for individual NHS Trusts can be found on the Submission History page.