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.