Price Concessions - starting to reduce? UPDATED

The latest price concession information for January has been released by the PSNC (in fact, two sets of data in quick succession). The PSNC have also stated that they are “still in discussion with the DHSC regarding further January 2018 price concessions”. Therefore we have made some calculations based on what we know at the moment - as soon as there are changes we will update this blog. UPDATE: We’ve now updated the data, both with the final concessions list for January 2018, and the actual cost data for December 2017.

For January 2018, on the surface price concessions look better than in previous months, with an estimated impact of about £14.9 million. This brings the total for the financial year to date to approximately £299 million. This is based on an estimated actual cost, using December data for January, so there will be slight changes when the actual data is available in mid-March.

CCG impacts for January and total to year so far

You can find all the data for each month for each CCG on a Google Sheet here.

Drug Tariff changes

This isn’t the full story though. Many drugs that were price concessions earlier in the financial year have now had a tariff increase similar to the previous concession price. This means that, although they are no longer showing on the data, they are costing the NHS much more than they were previously. One example of many is sumatriptan:

At the Bennett Institute we are currently working on a way of automatically identifying and flagging these “price shocks”. More info as we have it…

Don’t forget that our Drug Tariff and Price Concessions viewer is freely available here, and is updated on a daily basis! Our ebmbot checks the PSNC and Drug Tariff websites at 2am every morning, and automatically updates the viewer with any new data it finds. It also sends the team a message to let us know what it’s found:

As always, let us know your thoughts via email at feedback@openprescribing.net, on Twitter or on our Facebook page.