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.
This is the last report in the Prescribing Costs in Hospitals and the Community publication series by NHS Digital. The latest information for 2019/20 is included in the report, as well as a time series from 2014/15.
The NHS BSA are now publishing monthly management information on secondary care medicines from a data source collated and cleansed by Rx-Info available in the related links section. Work is underway to add in a cost figure to this monthly dataset in the near future. To avoid duplication and confusion amongst users of potentially different costs associated with different data sources this release will transition to the NHS BSA in 2020.
The NHS BSA plan to consult with users to include the option of retaining this publication as a separate release but using the new data source, or merging this release with other prescribing and dispensing official statistics produced by the NHS BSA, such as the annual Prescription Costs Analysis National Statistic release. This will provide users with a more comprehensive view of prescribing costs across the NHS in a single publication whilst aligning with the NHS BSA’s monthly data releases. Further details on the public consultation will be provided by the NHS BSA in due course.
Cost at list price of medicines was £20.9 billion in 2019/20
This is an increase of 9.9% from £19.0 billion in 2018/19
Cost at list price does not include discounts and is not necessarily the price the NHS paid
Hospital use accounted for 55.9% of the total cost at list price in 2019/20
This is a value of £11.7 billion, and has increased from £10.2 billion in 2018/19, when hospital use accounted for 53.9% 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 2019/20, the total hospital cost at list price increased by 14.0% on the previous year
This is in contrast to an increase of 5.2% 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: 12 November 2020 1:39 pm
