Dental Prescribing Data Extracts

From April 2022, prescribing data by Dentists in Wales will be made available at presentation level. The information is obtained from our prescribing and dispensing information systems.

The data covers prescriptions that are prescribed in Wales through Dental practices that are then dispensed in the community within Wales. The data includes all prescribed medicines, dressings and appliances that are dispensed each month. If a patient does not take a prescription to the pharmacy for dispensing, then the information will not be included in the dataset.

The data does not include private prescriptions.

Data will be published on the 1st working day of each month and will be available for the current and two complete financial years. Each compressed file will contain three individual files which can be viewed in applications such as Microsoft WordPad and Excel.

Prescribing data requires careful interpretation and should not be used in isolation.

Each month a compressed file containing three files will be available to download.

DentalDataFileCCYYMM The file contains the following:
- the responsible Health Board
- Responsible Locality
- BNF classification
- Drug name
- Number of items prescribed
- NIC - The Drug Tariff cost cost of the drug
- Actual Cost of the drug (Drug cost minus a discount plus container allowance)
- Quantity (number of capsules, tubes etc.)
- Defined Daily Dose (DDD)
- Average Daily Quantity (ADQ)
- Period in which the prescription was submitted for reimbursement

ChemSubstance - This provides the chemical substance using the first 9 characters of the BNF code included in the main Dental data file.
Address File - This file will provide details of the dental presriber's locality.

This data is available for use and re-use under the Open Government Licence (OGL). Please ensure that you understand the terms of the OGL before using our data.

Please refer to the documents below for information on the individual files.

FAQs

How do I contact you?

You can contact us by phone, email or post. Visit our Contact Us page for further information

Why have we moved to automated prescription processing?

Automated processing allows us to improve the accuracy of reimbursement to contractors by reducing the potential for human error. Our accuracy rate has improved from 99.15% to 99.54% since the introduction of automated processing.

It also improves our efficiency, making a significant contribution to: -

Our ability to continue to reimburse contractors in accordance with SLA timescales in the face of ever increasing prescription volumes
Our ability to release funds to be reinvested in front line NHS services. We process 47% more prescription items with 53% fewer staff since the inception of our automation programme.

Medicines Use Review & Prescription Interventions - what is the difference?

A number of queries have been raised by pharmacists regarding the differentiation between MURs and prescription intervention MURs. To clarify the matter Welsh Government has confirmed that there is only one service (i.e. the MUR service) but the service may be prompted in different ways.

Regular MURs can be prompted pro-actively by identification of a certain group of patients that subsequently lead to an invitation for a Medicines Use Review.

A prescription intervention MUR is more reactive, in the sense that it is the response to a significant adherence problem with a person's medication that subsequently leads to an MUR being conducted. This is distinct from pharmacists making clinical interventions on prescriptions (e.g. where an interaction is identified and there is a need to get a prescription amended) which are required by the terms of service for all pharmacy contractors.

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