Open Prescribing


“Every month, the NHS in England publishes anonymised data about the drugs prescribed by GPs. But the raw data files are large and unwieldy, with more than 600 million rows. We’re making it easier for GPs, managers and everyone to explore – supporting safer, more efficient prescribing.

OpenPrescribing is one of a range of projects built by Ben Goldacre and Anna Powell-Smith at the EBM Data Lab to help make complex medical and scientific data more accessible and more impactful in the real world…..

Data sources

Please read our guide to using the data.

Prescribing data is from the monthly files published by the Health and Social Care Information Centre(HSCIC), used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Practice list sizes are from the NHS Business Service Authority’s Information Portal, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence. ASTRO-PU and STAR-PUs are calculated from list sizes, based on standard formulas.

BNF codes and names are also from the NHS Business Service Authority’s Information Portal, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

CCG to practice relations, and practice prescribing settings, are from the HSCIC’s data downloads(epraccur.csv), used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

CCG names and codes and CCG geographic boundaries are from the Office for National Statistics, used under the terms of the Open Government Licence.

Practice locations are approximate, geocoded using OpenCageData. If you know a better source of practice locations (not including Code-Point Open), please get in touch!…(More)”