FOI-03956

Request   You asked us:  For BNF chemical substance 0402010AB (quetiapine), for prescriptions written in England and dispensed in the community during the financial year 2024/25, please provide the number of unique identified patients and the number of items, broken down by five-year age band and by patient gender. Please use the age bands and gender categories applied in the Medicines Used in Mental Health summary tables.   The NHSBSA has released data in this form before. Under reference FOI-03019, answered on 14 August 2025, you provided a breakdown of co-proxamol prescribing for unique patients in England by ten-year age band. This request is the same query applied to a different chemical substance.   The information is not already published. The Medicines Used in Mental Health tables cross age and gender with BNF section 0402 only, never with an individual chemical substance. The quarterly and calendar-year workbooks share the same structure, and no equivalent dataset appears on the Open Data Portal. It is therefore not information intended for future publication.   The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) received your request on 9 July 2026.  We have handled your request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000.   Our response   I can confirm that the NHSBSA holds the information you have requested and a copy of the information is attached.  Please read the notes to ensure correct understanding of the data.  NHS Prescription Services process prescriptions for pharmacy contractors, appliance contractors, dispensing doctors and for personal administration. Information then used to make payments to pharmacists and appliance contractors in England for prescriptions dispensed in primary care settings. Other arrangements are in place for making payments to dispensing doctors and for personal administration. This involves processing over 1 billion prescription items and payments totalling over £9 billion each year. The information gathered from this process is then used to provide information on costs and trends in prescribing in England and Wales to over 25,000 registered NHS and Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) users.  Data source – ePACT2   Data in ePACT2 is sourced from the NHSBSA Data Warehouse and is derived from products prescribed on prescriptions and dispensed in the community. The data captured from prescription processing is used to calculate reimbursement and remuneration. It includes items prescribed in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Guernsey/Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man which have been dispensed in the community in England. English prescribing that has been dispensed in Wales, Scotland, Guernsey/Alderney, Jersey, and Isle of Man is also included.   The data excludes:   items not dispensed, disallowed and those returned to the contractor for further   clarification  prescriptions prescribed and dispensed in prisons, hospitals, and private prescriptions  items prescribed but not presented for dispensing or not submitted to NHS Prescription Services by the dispenser  Time period   1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026- data is aggregated by the financial year.  Dataset   The data provides the number of items prescribed in the 2025/26 financial year for the chemical substance Quetiapine within British National Formulary 0402010AB. The data also confirms the number of unique identified patients, aggregated by the patient’s recorded gender and within 5-year age bands.  Organisation data   The data provided is for prescriptions prescribed in England and dispensed in the community.   BNF classification   The BNF code is a 15-digit code in which the first seven digits are allocated according to the categories in the BNF, and the last eight digits represent the medicinal product, form, strength and the link to the generic equivalent product. NHS Prescription Services has created pseudo BNF chapters, which are not published, for items not included in BNF chapters 1 to 15. Most of such items are dressings and appliances which NHS Prescription Services has classified into four pseudo BNF chapters (20 to 23).  Gender   Patient gender has been reported using the latest patient gender information held by the NHSBSA Information Services data warehouse at the time that the data was extracted. This uses information from either the most recent Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) message or from the last time that NHSBSA received data about the patient's gender from NHS Personal Demographics Service.     Gender is classified as:  male  female  not known (where no information is held)  indeterminate (where information is held but which does not confirm either male or female)  Patient identification     Where patient identifiable figures have been reported they are based on the information captured during the prescription processing activities. Patient details cannot be captured from every prescription form. For this dataset, patient information was available for 97.43% of prescription items.  The patient count figures are based on a distinct count of NHS number as captured from the prescription image.    The figures for the number of identifiable patients should not be combined and reported at any other level than provided as this may result in the double counting of patients. For example, a single patient could appear in the results for multiple age bands.    The age that we hold for reporting can come from a range of sources and we record the best available information at the time of processing. This document sets out the logic used for this and gives more detail on how ages should be interpreted.    https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/2018-02/180115%20Age%20Logic%20Summary%20Flow%20Chart…        Ultimately the age held in our records may be subject to errors originating from either external data source such as the Electronic Prescribing System (EPS), the NHS Personal Demographics Service (PDS) or the NHSBSA optical character recognition process used to extract data from paper prescriptions.       The specific ages in this question may be subject to those errors. We do not systematically review, validate, or amend the data after it has been processed or recorded.   Items   Items show the number of times a product appears on a prescription form, not the quantity prescribed.    Data Queries   Please contact  [email protected]  ensuring you quote the above reference if you have any specific questions regarding this response; or, if you feel you may be misunderstanding or misinterpreting the information; or, if you plan on publishing the data.  Reusing the data and copyright   If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data, please contact  [email protected] . This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.  The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at:  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/    Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement: “ePACT2, NHSBSA Copyright 2026”. Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.  Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.