FOI-01314

Thank you for your request for information about the following:

Please can you provide a monthly breakdown of the number of covid vaccinations provided by pharmacies in england
Time period: 01/06/2020 - 01/06/2021

Your request was received on 18 July 2023 and has been dealt with under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

##Response

A copy of the information is attached.

Please note that pharmacies only need to tell us about the vaccines that they administer if they want to be paid for them - so strictly our data is about payments for vaccines rather than the vaccines themselves

The NHSBSA calculates payments for covid vaccinations to Pharmacies and Primary Care Network (PCN) providers in England. Covid vaccination data is keyed in via Point of Care (POC) Systems and they transferred to the NHSBSA Manage Your Service (MYS) application. Each month, vaccine providers submit claims to request payment based on the data that has been transferred into MYS. To be paid in a timely fashion such claims must be submitted during a specified declaration submission period. Should claims be submitted outside the submission period they will be processed in the following period. This means that in some cases there is a difference between the number of vaccines that have been 'claimed' and the number that have been 'paid'. Only 'paid' vaccinations have been reported in this request.

When considering the nature of the vaccine data there are several ways it can be reported over time:

__Administration Month:__ This is the month in which the vaccine was administered to the patient.

__Payment Month:__ This is the month in which the payment was made dispenser of the vaccine. Note that all payments for Pharmacies are paid one month later than those for PCN providers.

__Keying Month:__ This is the month in which the vaccine record first appeared on the MYS system.

__Submission/Claim Month:__ This is the month in which the claim for payment for a vaccination occurred.

For example, suppose that a PCN patient is given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month) and then the paper record of this is misplaced for a while.
The record is found and keyed into a POC system during February (Keying Month). The Provider is allowed to claim for keying during February in the first 5 days of March, but they're a little late and authorise the claim on the 7th of March (Submission Month). As the claim is outside the submission window it is not paid in March, it will instead be processed during April (Payment Month).

Another example could be a Pharmacy patient given a covid vaccination dose 1 in January (Administration Month), keyed in January (Keying Month), then submitted in February (Submission Month) and then payments are calculated in February, however as this is for a pharmacy the payments are held back and not paid until March (Payment Month).

For the purposes of this request, we have chosen to report by Administration Month.

Data included in this request is limited to vaccinations carried out by Pharmacies only.

Data included in this request is also limited to vaccinations administered between June 2020 and May 2021. The COVID-19 vaccines were only available from December 2020 and first administered by pharmacies in January 2021, so there is no data for June to December 2020.

The latest data used is a snapshot of the MYS system data that was taken on 6th July 2023. This is the snapshot of data taken after the June 2023 submission period that was used to calculate payments.  Pharmacy name and address are as held at this date.

Vaccination records are limited to those which have been associated with a declaration submission. This may include late submission declarations received after the deadline for declarations such records are not processed until the next month.

##Data Queries
If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data, please contact foidata@nhsbsa.nhs.uk ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact communicationsteam@nhsbsa.nhs.uk This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.


The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ 

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement:
“Copyright 2023” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/ 

Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated.  

Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.


Tags: covid vaccinations
Organization: Freedom of Information Disclosure Log