Health Survey England Additional Analyses, Ethnicity and Health, 2011-2019 Experimental statistics

Prescribing is the most common patient-level intervention in the National Health Service (NHS), and covers all sectors of care, including primary care and hospital. It is the second highest area of spending in the NHS, after staffing costs.

Analyses of prescribed medicine use are restricted to those reported to have been taken in the last seven days. Smoking cessation products (nicotine and other medicine) and contraception are excluded.

At the nurse visit, participants were asked: ‘Are you taking or using any medicines, pills, syrups, ointments, puffers or injections prescribed for you by a doctor or nurse?’ If they were, the nurse recorded each prescribed item, where possible having seen the medicine packs. Items were coded by the nurse into medicine classes based on the sub-sections of the British National Formulary (BNF). Up to 22 different medicines could be recorded. For each medicine, a follow up question asked whether they had taken or used that medicine in the last seven days.

Data combined from the 2012 and 2013 surveys estimated that 43% of men and 50% of women had taken at least one prescribed medicine in the past week, and 22% of men and 24% of women had taken three or more prescribed medicines medicines (see HSE 2013 Chapter 5 Use of prescribed medicines).

 Analysis combining data from 2015 and 2016 produced very similar estimates; 44% of men and 51% of women had taken at least one prescribed medicine in the last week, and 24% of men and 25% of women had taken at least three types of medicine (see  Health Survey for England 2016 Adult prescribed medicines).

Prescribed medicine use varied widely between ethnic groups. Chinese men and women were much less likely than others to report taking any prescribed medicines  or to be taking three or more medicines. 12% of Chinese men and 19% of Chinese women had taken at least one prescribed medicine and 3% of Chinese men and 2% of Chinese women had taken three or more medicines. Note that the estimates for Chinese men are based on relatively small numbers of participants and should be treated with caution.

Among other groups, between 23% and 49% of men and between 29% and 64% of women were taking one medicine or more. Between 7% and 34% of men and between 8% and 38% of women were taking three or more medicines in the last seven days.

When age was taken into account, the prevalence of taking one or more medicines was highest among Bangladeshi men and lowest among men from Chinese, black African and Other white backgrounds. Among women, no group stood out as having particularly high or low prevalence of medicine use in the past week.¹

^{1 Ethnicity p<0.001, ethnicity*sex p=0.437}