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 has been 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, as 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 is 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.