English Prescribing Data (EPD).
The monthly NHSBSA dataset behind almost every NHS prescribing chart: every item dispensed in the community in England, by practice and presentation.
The English Prescribing Dataset is the workhorse of NHS prescribing analysis. Every month the NHS Business Services Authority publishes a row for each combination of prescribing practice and dispensed presentation in England, roughly 80 million rows a month. Each row carries items, quantity, net ingredient cost and actual cost, coded to the BNF hierarchy.
It publishes around six to eight weeks after the month it covers, and it is genuinely open: anyone may download it, use it commercially and build on it under the Open Government Licence. DoseTrend's primary care view is built from it.
What it cannot show matters as much as what it can. There is no hospital dispensing, no patient identity or count, no indication, and no manufacturer share for anything prescribed generically. Anyone selling you those things from EPD alone is selling you an estimate.
Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD) · Monthly hospital medicines data for England: what NHS trusts issued, in unit-of-measure quantities, with indicative costs.
BNF code · The 15-character legacy hierarchy the NHSBSA uses to code prescribing data, from chapter down to individual presentation.
Items (prescription items) · One item is one product on one prescription form, dispensed once. It is the unit of NHS prescribing volume, and it is not a patient.
Net ingredient cost (NIC) · The list price of what was dispensed, before discounts. The spend figure in open prescribing data, and a ceiling rather than a bill.
Open Government Licence (OGL v3.0) · Free commercial use of most UK public sector data, on one substantive condition: attribute the source.
See it on a real molecule.
Every molecule page uses this term somewhere: in the scorecard, the charts or the honesty strip. The definitions live here; the numbers live there.