Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much his Department has spent on dispensing smoking cessation products via the NHS in each of the last three years.

Information is only available centrally on the cost of smoking cessation medication that has been dispensed to National Health Service patients using the FP10 prescription form. There are various other routes in which such medication can be supplied to a patient from the NHS including from community pharmacies via voucher schemes and a direct supply to patients from a Patient Group Direction.

Smoking cessation drugs are classified under section British National Formulary (BNF) 4.10.2, Nicotine dependence, using the BNF classification system prior to edition 70.

The following table provides the Net Ingredient Cost (NIC) of smoking cessation medication where they have only been dispensed in the community via an FP10 form in England in the specified years.

Source: Prescription Cost Analysis NHS Digital

Notes:

1. Prescription Cost Analysis (PCA) Data

Prescription information is taken from the PCA system, supplied by NHS Prescription Services, a division of NHS Business Services Authority, and is based on a full analysis of all prescriptions dispensed in the community i.e. by community pharmacists and appliance contractors, dispensing doctors, and prescriptions submitted by prescribing doctors for items personally administered in England. Also included are prescriptions written in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man but dispensed in England. The data do not cover drugs dispensed in hospitals, including mental health trusts, or private prescriptions. (Prescribers are general practitioners, hospital doctors, dentists and non-medical prescribers such as nurses and pharmacists.)

2. Net Ingredient Cost (NIC)

This is the basic cost of a drug as used in primary care. This is the cost at list price excluding VAT, i.e. the price listed in the national Drug Tariff or in standard price lists and is not necessarily the price the NHS paid. It does not take into account any contract prices or discounts, dispensing costs, fees or prescription charge income, so the amount the NHS paid will be different. NIC is used in Prescription Services reports and other analyses, as it standardises cost throughout prescribing nationally, and allows comparisons of data from different sources. The figures are in pounds.

3. BNF Classifications

The PCA system uses the therapeutic classifications defined in the BNF using the classification system prior to edition 70. Information on why a drug is prescribed is not available in this dataset. Since drugs can be prescribed to treat more than one condition, it may not be possible to separate the different conditions for which a drug may have been prescribed.

The primary purpose of the BNF is to provide information for clinicians. The format of the BNF was changed with Edition 70 (September 2015 - March 2016) to make it more user friendly. However the NHS Business Service Authority, who process dispensed prescription forms and collects dispensed prescribing data and produce the PCA data, continue to use the old BNF classification system to code medicines, which has become widely used in the United Kingdom as a classification to allow comparisons between drug groups. For example it is used to report cost and trend in medicines use and supports several NHS Digital official publications. The data are used in many NHS IT systems.