The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 275 No 7360 p430
8 October 2005

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Hospital drugs account for 22.3pc of NHS drug’s bill

Hospital pharmacies are responsible for 22.3 per cent of the total NHS drug’s bill in England, according to official figures released for the first time last week.

The estimated cost of medicines issued by hospital pharmacies to patients in 2004 was £2.3m, an increase of just under 10 per cent compared with 2003, the statistics from the NHS health and social care information centre (HSCIC) revealed.

It is the first time that these figures relating to the cost of drugs issued in hospital have been made public and reflects an attempt by the HSCIC to put hospital prescribing in the context of the bigger NHS picture.

President of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists, Tony West, said: “I think if you rang any chief pharmacist in any hospital in the UK they would probably tell you that 25 per cent of the drugs in the NHS are used in secondary care and that costs in the last year have gone up from between eight to 12 per cent. Those increased costs are mostly down to new expensive drugs such as those for cancer.” He said what patients were interested in was whether they can access drugs.

The statistics compared prescribing costs across strategic health authorities and highlighted how the bill was shared between hospital and primary care. The figures focused on the costs of three kinds of drugs — antibacterials, antipsychotics and antidepressants.

The report revealed that, overall, 59 per cent of the total cost of antibacterials was attributable to hospital pharmacies in 2004. Hospital use of antibacterials varied across strategic health authorities from 46 per cent in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire up to 75.8 per cent in North West London. However, the report pointed out that because patients in hospital are “generally more unwell” than those in primary care the figures are not necessarily a “good measure of the volume of antibacterials used”.

Only 4.2 per cent of the NHS drugs bill for antidepressants was traced back to hospital pharmacies, with the lion’s share of the bill met from prescriptions written by GPs. Hospital use of antidepressants varied from 2.5 per cent in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire to 8.7 per cent in South East London.

Hospital pharmacies were responsible for nearly a third of the total cost of all antipsychotic drugs used in the NHS in 2004. Hospital use of antipsychotics varied from 24.3 per cent in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight to 50 per cent in South East London.