The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7488 p145
9 February 2008

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Drug spending rises but not as proportion of total NHS cost

NHS spending on medicines rose from over £5.3bn in 1997 to more than £10.7bn in 2006, according to the Office of Health Economics’s ‘Compendium of health statistics 2008’.

But the publication, launched in London this week, also reveals that drug spending as a percentage of total NHS costs reduced from 11.7 to 10.5 per cent over the same 10-year period.

In addition, the OHE reports that generic medicines made up as much as 60 per cent of prescriptions dispensed by pharmacists in England in 2006, compared with less than a sixth in 1982.