Notices of correction

2015/16 to 2022/23 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 15 September 2023

It's been identified that an error was made in this release when training the model of expected items based on pre-pandemic trends. The model was initially trained on the full data instead of only on data from April 2015 to February 2020. This has affected the charts and commentary in section 3 of the statistical summary narrative.

A narrative containing the corrected version of the affected charts and commentary has been produced and can be found in the resources list for this release.

There is no change to the key findings of this release, but the error in model training resulted in incorrect data in the info boxes, charts and commentary in section 3 only.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

2015/16 to 2021/22 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 2 August 2022

It's been identified that data has been assigned to the incorrect IMD Decile in the statistical summary tables of the latest release. This is due to an ordering error in code used to produce these statistics.

This affects Table 8: Indices of Deprivation (IMD) in each of the statistical summary tables found in the resources list for this release.

Corrected tables have been produced assigning Total Identified Patients, Total Items, and Total Net Ingredient Cost (GBP) to the correct IMD Decile.

There is no change to the key findings of this release and the correct data was used in the statistical narrative. 

The mislabelling of this field would contradict the conclusions that would previously have been drawn using data from the statistical summary tables.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

2015/16 to 2019/20 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 10 December 2020

It has been identified that a column, Identified Patient Flag, was omitted from the statistical summary tables of the latest release.

This affects Table 4 - STP in each of the statistical summary tables found in the resources list for this release.

The tables have been reproduced to include the omitted column.

There is no change to the key findings of this release. The omission of this field would not contradict the conclusions that would previously have been drawn from the data.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

2022/23 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 27 July 2023

It has been identified that SNOMED codes have appeared incorrectly in the statistical summary tables of the latest release. This was caused by SNOMED codes being formatted as integers and not as a character field. The statistical analysis software used to produce this release has a known issue with being unable to represent very large integers. SNOMED codes corresponding to a number higher than the threshold were converted to a different number, making these codes incorrect.

This affects the SNOMED code tables in the national summary tables for both the 2022/23 financial year and 2022 calendar year found in the resources list for this release.

Corrected tables have been produced with SNOMED codes formatted as characters.

There is no change to the key findings of this release and the correct data was used in the statistical narrative.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

2022/23 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 10 July 2023

It has been identified that data has been assigned to the incorrect SNOMED code in the statistical summary tables of the latest release. This is due to products being assigned the pack level SNOMED code in March instead of the product level SNOMED code.

This affects the SNOMED codes tables in the national summary table for the 2022/23 financial year found in the resources list for this release.

Corrected tables have been produced assigning the product level SNOMED code.

There is no change to the key findings of this release and the correct data was used in the statistical narrative.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

2019 Annual summary statistics

Date of notice: 5 May 2020

It has been identified that a column, Standard Quantity Unit, was omitted from the presentation level tables of the latest release.

This affects Table 5 (Presentations) in the Prescription Cost Analysis 2019 – Statistical summary tables (Excel: 3.8MB), and the historical presentation level tables which are also added as yearly CSVs to our Open Data Portal.

This omission was caused by an oversight on our part during the transition of this publication from NHS Digital. The standard quantity unit is a field that is no longer available to us after our move to a single source of information for drugs reporting. This was discussed in the Background Information and Methodology note that accompanies this release. NHS Digital communicated this in their 2018 release but were able to carry out an exercise to make this column available.

We appreciate that we have not clearly communicated the removal of this field in our publication as a pre-announced change to the 2019 release when we should have done, along with the reasoning behind this and any impacts on the statistics.

Unfortunately, we are unable to amend the released data to include this field, as it is no longer held as an attribute within our reporting systems. A potential replacement for this field has been identified that is held within our systems. However, we cannot re-release this year’s publication with it included due to issues that it would create with disaggregation of historical data. It's anticipated that this field will be included in the PCA – England 2020 release.

There is no change to the key findings of this release, nor would the omission of this field contradict the conclusions that would previously have been drawn from the data.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.