Price Concessions Calculator

[brianmackenna]

Some suggestions

• On the ALL England page the normal cost of GTN is described as £95 for 12,114 pumps.

Tariff prices are here but I wonder is it to do with the odd pack sizes?

• Buprenorphine there are significant amount of costs of Buprenorphine that go through "non-CCG routes" as Local Councils are generally responsible for funding it. Local councils and public health departments don't have access to the other NHS data sources commonly used on prescribing (PrescQIPP and ePACT2). My preference would be for us to make this information available in some way either on this dashboard or another method so this data is visible as the Buprenorphine has attracted a huge amount of interest. It is also proportionally a much bigger part of the relevant public health budget and will likely lead to cuts in other services.

Text on page

Price concessions are a short term agreement by the NHS to pay for more expensive versions of a medicine because the cheaper version has temporarily gone out-of-stock.

Can this be changed please? Its a bit of a pedant point but there is actually stock obtainable when NCSO is applied - if there is temporary stock shortage no concession is paid as no product is dispensed. I suggest Price concessions are a short term agreement by the NHS to pay for more expensive versions of a generic medicine. This occurs because sometimes pharmacy contractors have to dispense an equivalent product that is only available above the set Drug Tariff price. Examples of why this may happen are changes in the value of sterling or manufacturers temporarily suspending production of a generic medicine meaning there is less supply

• Financial reporting - CCGs will typically report the figures in one of two ways a) in the last 12 months we have spent an additional x on NCSO b) in the financial year to date we have spent/estimated to spend an additional x in the first x months (only available data and due to the nature of NCSO is it impossible to predict or average to get a 12 month estimate) It would be good if a total box could be placed on the page to reflect b) and a) if possible

• Latest month - due to the graphs updating daily we should probably indicate that the latest month is incomplete. Suggest doing it by colouring differently.

• Stray space:

• [ ] GTN

• [ ] Buprenorphine

• [x] Text changes

• [x] Financial reporting

• [x] Latest month incomplete

• [x] Stray space

[evansd]

@brianmackenna A few notes following some investigation with Seb:

On the ALL England page the normal cost of GTN is described as £95 for 12,114 pumps.

This is part of a wider problem we've had before where "quantity" has different meanings in the data: sometimes it means number of packs/bottles/pumps etc and sometimes it means number tablets/millilitres/puffs etc. In this particular case the quantity represents the number of pumps but we're other parts of our system think it means number of doses and so it's dividing by 200 to try to get the number of pumps. We haven't yet found a good general solution to this, but we've come up with something which can fix this specific issue and hopefully provide a foundation we can build on for addressing the problem more generally.

[evansd]

Buprenorphine there are significant amount of costs of Buprenorphine that go through "non-CCG routes" as Local Councils are generally responsible for funding it. Local councils and public health departments don't have access to the other NHS data sources commonly used on prescribing (PrescQIPP and ePACT2). My preference would be for us to make this information available in some way either on this dashboard or another method so this data is visible as the Buprenorphine has attracted a huge amount of interest. It is also proportionally a much bigger part of the relevant public health budget and will likely lead to cuts in other services.

It turns out we already have dashboards for organisations that aren't standard GP practices, we just don't list them in the practice search. For example: https://openprescribing.net/practice/Y06021/

And this also has its own concessions dashboard where you can see the Buprenorphine costs: https://openprescribing.net/practice/Y06021/concessions/

What we don't have is anything that groups these together at e.g. local authority or national level. That's a wider piece of work, but something it definitely seems worth addressing. So I'm splitting that into a new issue.