Prescription Cost Analysis - England

Prescription Cost Analysis (PCA) is an accredited official statistic release. It provides details of the number of items and the Net Ingredient Cost (NIC) of all prescriptions dispensed in the community in England.

As well as the annual PCA accredited official statistic release, a monthly administrative management information dataset is released by NHSBSA Prescription Information Services. This is available from January 2021 onwards from the NHSBSA Open Data Portal. This monthly data is produced with the same methodology applied as the annual accredited official statistics. However, it is not an official statistic.

You can view data between February 2008 and March 2021 in a legacy format on our website.

There is a small difference between the annual PCA release and the monthly administrative data. The geographical structure used in the annual publication is the structure at the 31 March of the given year. For the monthly data the geographical structure used is the one at the end of the given month. In the rare event that a dispensing contractor changes parent organisation during the year this will reflect in the monthly data, and may mean that ICB level totals will not match between aggregated monthly data and the annual accredited official statistics. This will not impact national totals.

From 1 July 2022, Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) have been replaced by Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) within the NHS geographical structure. Our publications have also changed from presenting data at STP level to presenting data at ICB level. Publications using data from July 2022 onwards will use the ICB level format.

You can find further information on the move to Integrated Care Boards on the NHS Digital website.