Pharmaceutical Services

The NHS Business Services Authority Prescription Pricing Division's Pharmaceutical Directorate staff provides advice on a wide range of prescribing and dispensing issues for both existing services and the development of new and improved services. The main areas of activity are:

• support for Prescription Pricing Division operational activities and provision of information services
  
  
• support to the Department of Health in implementation of remuneration and reimbursement policy for Pharmaceutical Services, including preparation of the Drug Tariff
  
  
• prescribing analysis and support for NHS prescribing initiatives.
  

The Directorate has ISO 9001:2000 certification for all its activities.

The Pharmaceutical Directorate considers the impact on the Prescription Pricing Division of NHS Acts and Regulations that affect the provision of General Medical and Pharmaceutical Services. Every month the Drug Tariff is produced and distributed on behalf of the Department of Health. The Directorate is jointly responsible with the Department of Health for processing submissions from manufacturers and suppliers for listing in Drug Tariff Part IX - Appliances. In addition the Drug Tariff Part IX appliances are monitored and prices amended in accordance with the agreement between the Department of Health and the Association of British Healthcare Industries.

Prescription Pricing Division prescription processing staff use operational instructions prepared by the Directorate; for example technical procedure manuals, medicine charts and memoranda. These instructions apply the reimbursement and remuneration rules for the provision of NHS pharmaceutical services. The Directorate also works closely with the Department of Health to assess how NHS policies such as the new contract for community pharmacy affect the work of the Prescription Pricing Division. Support is provided for Prescription Pricing Division prescription processing to handle the increasing volume of prescriptions and number of different types of prescribers.

Prescription Pricing Division operational staff and community pharmacists contact the Pharmaceutical Directorate for advice on processing of prescriptions. More generally manufacturers and suppliers of medicines, Primary Care Trusts and the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee also contact the Directorate with information and for relevant advice.

The Prescription Pricing Division’s Drug master file provides the current source of information for prescription processing and for producing prescribing and dispensing reports. It also incorporates the Prescription Pricing Division’s therapeutic coding system based on the British National Formulary that is used in analysing prescribing information.

The Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d) is an electronic dictionary of the medicines and devices that are used in the diagnosis and treatment of patients in the NHS and provides the NHS standard for medicine and device identification. The dm+d provides the vocabulary for linking clinical product information and supports the interoperability of diverse clinical systems including the application of effective decision support. It provides unique identifiers and unique textual descriptions for specific medicines and devices.

Dm+d will underpin many of the activities within the NHS Connecting for Health. Dm+d data will be used in patient specific summaries of care and clinical histories that will be held on a national database known as the “Spine”. This will ensure that patient specific medicines information is available throughout the NHS, primary and secondary care in any location. Data supplied from dm+d will support the electronic prescribing, transmission, dispensing, and processing of the 650 million prescription items currently dispensed in England and Wales.

A statistical sample of prescription forms processed by the Prescription Pricing Division is reprocessed each month by Pharmaceutical staff to monitor standards and measure the accuracy of prescription data captured and payments made to community pharmacies, dispensing doctors and appliance contractors.

The Directorate contributes to the promotion of clinical and cost effective prescribing in the NHS through advice on analysis of prescribing data and drug utilisation. The Prescription Pricing Division’s Prescribing Analysis Report provides GPs with frequent information about their prescribing patterns. The Prescribing Review section focuses on national prescribing priorities and summarises NHS policies and recent evidence to support effective prescribing. It highlights national trends in prescribing and allows GPs to compare their prescribing to local and national data.

Information on prescribing trends is provided to support the delivery of the National Prescribing Centre’s therapeutic workshops for prescribing advisers in primary care organisations. Prescribing advisers can access comparative prescribing figures for all major therapeutic areas through the website. This helps them to bench mark their performance.

To provide this wide range of services, the Pharmaceutical Directorate employs staff with a range of specialist skills. These include pharmaceutical professional and technical, statistical and data handling skills. The Directorate’s staff also has experience of identifying and implementing quality improvements through working with internal and external customers.

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