Methodology

Sources

Every figure comes from an official publication: NHS Business Services Authority for England, Public Health Scotland for Scotland, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership for Wales and the HSC Business Services Organisation for Northern Ireland, with Companies House, the Office for National Statistics and national deprivation indices alongside. Each publisher and its licence is listed on the data credits page.

No data about individual patients is used. Where a payment figure is estimated rather than published, the page labels it as an estimate. A statement a member uploads for their own pharmacy is shown only to that member.

Publication lags

Each nation publishes on its own timetable, and services are often published later than dispensing. Pharmacy8 always works to each nation's and each measure's own latest published month, rather than a single date for everything.

Averaging windows

Most figures are an average per reported month over a window of calendar months: 1, 3, 6, 12 or 24 months ending at the latest published month. Windows are calendar-based, so a gap in the data never stretches a window backwards.

A month with no published figure is left out of the average. It is never counted as zero.

National bands on public pages

Public pharmacy pages show coarse bands, such as "Top 25% in Scotland for dispensing volume", instead of figures. A pharmacy is compared only with others in the same nation, over the latest 12 published months, and needs at least six reported months to be placed.

Bands are shown only for the top half. A 12-month trend is shown as growing (2% or more up on the previous 12 months) or steady (within 2%); a fall is not shown publicly.

Top-10 lists

The public top-10 lists rank community pharmacies within each nation on average items per month, Pharmacy First consultations per month (the Common Ailments Service in Wales) and growth on the previous 12 months. A pharmacy needs ten reported months (six for Pharmacy First), and growth needs a base of at least 3,000 items a month. Online (distance-selling) pharmacies are left out because their volumes are not comparable with high-street pharmacies.

Who counts as a community pharmacy

A pharmacy appears on public pages when it has dispensed in its nation's latest three published months, so closed pharmacies and old codes for premises that changed hands drop out. Appliance contractors are excluded from pharmacy lists, rankings and market shares. In Scotland, the pharmacy register also includes dispensing GP practices and appliance suppliers, so a Scottish contractor is treated as a community pharmacy only when it has a four-digit contractor code and has delivered Pharmacy First in the latest 12 months.

Deprivation

Deprivation deciles are always shown on the official scale, where 1 is the most deprived 10% of areas. Scotland uses the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and England the English Indices of Deprivation.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking compares a pharmacy only with pharmacies in the same nation: all of them, those in the same ICB or health board, or those in the same size band by average items a month (under 4,000; 4,000 to 7,500; 7,500 to 12,000; 12,000 and over). Each measure is an average per reported month over the chosen window, and ratios are worked out from the window's totals. Scottish services and most Scottish payments are published quarterly and compared over their own window.

Rank 1 is the highest. The percentile is the share of the cohort at or below the pharmacy: (1 − (rank − 1) ÷ (cohort size − 1)) × 100, where the cohort size includes the pharmacy itself. For services and payments, only pharmacies with published activity are ranked, so a pharmacy that does not offer a service is left out rather than ranked last. A measure is ranked only when at least 20 pharmacies in the cohort have activity, quartiles are taken by linear interpolation, and the top-10% threshold is shown from 40 pharmacies. The upper quartile is the 75th percentile and above; below median is under the 50th.

GP surgery market share

A pharmacy's share of a GP surgery's prescriptions comes from official data linking each prescribing practice to the pharmacy that dispensed its items. Only complete published months are used, and appliance contractors are left out of the shares.