Context The British National Health Service releases data covering every public sector prescription made in the country. This covers a single year of that data. Content Covering all general practices in England, the data includes figures on the number of prescription items that are dispensed each month and information relating to costs. For each GP practice, the total number of items that were prescribed and then dispensed is shown. The total Net Ingredient Cost and the total Actual Cost of these items is shown. Chemical level All prescribed and dispensed medicines (by chemical name), dressings and appliances (at section level) are listed for each GP practice. Presentation level All prescribed and dispensed medicines, dressings and appliances are listed at presentation level, for each GP practice. (Presentation level gives the individual drug name, the form, and strength or size accordingly). The total quantity of drugs dispensed (in terms of number of tablets or millilitres, for example) is shown. This data does not list each individual prescription and does not contain any patient identifiable data. The data have been edited from their original version. During the data preparation process I: - Dropped obsolete and redundant columns. - Normalized the BNF (British National Formulary) codes, BNF names, and practice codes. These steps reduced the total file size by roughly 75%, at the cost of requiring one table join to access some of the data. For further details, please see: - [FAQ](http://content.digital.nhs.uk/media/10048/FAQs-Practice-Level-Prescribingpdf/pdf/PLP_FAQs_April_2015.pdf) - [Glossary of Terms](http://content.digital.nhs.uk/media/10686/Download-glossary-of-terms-for-GP-prescribing---presentation-level/pdf/PLP_Presentation_Level_Glossary_April_2015.pdf) Acknowledgements This dataset was kindly released by the [United Kingdom's National Health Service][1] under their [government open data license v3.][2] You can find this and other datasets at their open data site. Inspiration - What trends can you see in the data? For example, can you identify the onset of winter based on the types of drugs being prescribed? - The BNF Name entries contain dosage data that I haven't yet cleaned and extracted. Can you unpack that field into item dispensed, units, and dosage? If so, let me know in the forums and I'll add it to the dataset! - Per [this blog from Oxford](https://ebmdatalab.net/prescribing-data-bnf-codes/), the raw BNF codes contain quite a bit of information about a drug's function. Can you find a source of open data for translating these codes? It's probable that one exists somewhere at https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/nhs-prescription-services. [1]: http://content.digital.nhs.uk/gpprescribingdata [2]: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/