Summary
Prescribing Costs in Hospitals and the Community reports the overall cost at list price, before any discounts, of medicines used in hospitals and those prescribed in primary care in England. It is not necessarily the price the NHS paid.
The latest information for 2018/19 is included in the report, as well as a time series from 2014/15. This report revises previously published figures for primary care prescribing as it now includes prescribing by dentists and is sourced from the NHS BSA new data warehouse.
Earlier this year, a public consultation was carried out by NHS Digital on the development of prescribing data. Respondents welcomed proposals to move to new data sources, which will enable this report to provide information on the actual cost paid by the NHS for medicines.
Further insight will follow in Spring 2020, introducing figures on actual costs and comparisons between the data sources. In anticipation of this further insight, data is only available at national level due to the differences in collection methodology at regional and medicine level in the different data sources.
Cost at list price of medicines was £18.9 billion in 2018/19
This is an increase of 4.1% from £18.2 billion in 2017/18
Cost at list price does not include discounts and is not necessarily the price the NHS paid
Hospital use accounted for 53.7% of the total cost at list price in 2018/19
This is a value of £10.2 billion, and has increased from £9.2 billion in 2017/18, when hospital use accounted for 50.3% of the total cost at list price
Cost at list price does not include discounts and is not necessarily the price the NHS paid
In 2018/19, the total hospital cost at list price increased by 11.1% on the previous year
This is in contrast to a decrease of 2.8% in cost at list price for primary care
Cost at list price does not include discounts and is not necessarily the price the NHS paid
View graphical visualisations of the data in the Results section
Last edited: 14 November 2019 8:06 am
