General Pharmaceutical Services and Prescribing Statistics
The information detailed below is derived from the FPS pharmacy payment system. It includes information on pharmaceutical dispensing volumes and costs based upon payment claims submitted by community pharmacies, dispensing doctors and appliance suppliers. This information does not include details of valid prescriptions that have not been taken to a contractor for dispensing. It also does not include information on pharmaceutical dispensing activity from hospital pharmacies.
Current Annual Publication
Date Published: 30th June 2022
Date of Next Release: June 2023
The statistics will be released on this page at 9.30am. If you have issues accessing the information it can also be found on the gov.uk site
Responsible Statistician: Ken Griffin
Email: Ken.Griffin@hscni.net
Presents information on community pharmacy in Northern Ireland including detail on practitioners, premises and prescribing.
Quarterly Pharmaceutical Services Statistics
Date Published: 23rd February 2023
Date of Next Release: June 2023
The statistics will be released on this page at 9.30am. If you have issues accessing the information it can also be found on the gov.uk site.
Responsible Statistician: Rob Cunningham
Email: Rob.Cunningham@hscni.net
This quarterly series is a subset of the annual information with data provided for selected key tables. The quarterly updates within a year should be treated as provisional and may be revised when figures are finalised to produce the end of year annual report.
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FPS General Pharmaceutical Services Statistics Infographic: To QE December 2023
Note on new data source
During the 2021/22 financial year a new SQL database (PRD) was introduced to record the dispensing of prescriptions in primary care. This database incorporated a number of improvements to the data source previously used to produce these statistics (PaidPR). While these enhancements improve the quality of the statistics produced, it is almost inevitable that they will result in minor discontinuities with earlier series of data.
Analysis has shown that the enhancements have resulted in quarterly differences to figures of around 0.1-0.2% in respect of geographical breakdown and up to 0.5-0.6% for certain age categories. Differences of this magnitude will not distort any trend analysis. There have been some more significant differences to some categories in those tables containing a BNF classification – more information on this is provided within the relevant publications.
Quality Documentation
Listed below are various documents to support the publication of FPS Pharmaceutical Statistics.
FPS Pharmacy Background Quality Report
FPS Pharmacy Quality Assurance of Administrative Data Report
Previous publications
Previous publications can be found here.