Improvements to how the Secondary Care Medicines Data is published

In a previous post, we explained that the Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD) is initially made available as provisional data which is subject to change before being finalised. At that time, we didn’t have access to provisional and finalised versions of the same months’ data, so we couldn’t investigate how the data changes when it is finalised. The good news is that a new version of the SCMD has now been published, which allows access to both versions of the data. Let’s have a look at it!

More finalised data

The first bit of good news is that there is now a lot more finalised data available. Finalised data is now available through March 2024 and provisional data is available through January 2025. This is now aligned with the release schedule reported in the data release guidance. We have imported the latest data and updated the Submission History (see our post explaining this feature) for trusts on OpenPrescribing Hospitals. On this page, you’ll be able to see the other improvements described below.

Data for missing trusts

In our previous post, Organising Organisations: Data completeness, we showed that there were some trusts that we expected to see in the SCMD but didn’t. One of these trusts, Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare NHS Trust, is now in the dataset. However, as shown by the red bars in the chart below, data is missing for most months. Community services in Hounslow were transferred to West London NHS Trust and this trust submitted a case to NHS England to merge with Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust towards the end of 2024, which is evident from the submission history data below.

Improved data consistency

With the new finalised data, there are also improvements to the data consistency for individual trusts. One example is Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust which previously showed a dip in the number of unique products reported in the SCMD between September 2022 and April 2023. This dip is no longer present following the recent update.

Another example is the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, which previously had missing submissions for some months in 2023. Data for these months is now available.

These changes reflect work to improve data consistency for trusts which have switched pharmacy stock control providers, as indicated in the data release guidance.

NHS Trusts may switch their pharmacy stock control providers as per their business requirements. Some Trusts have switched over to newer pharmacy stock control systems in 2023. As of August 2024, the integration of the new pharmacy stock control systems at these Trusts to capture data is being facilitated and it is work in progress. This might explain some of the existing data gaps, and data will be made available as the integration work is complete at Trusts.

We expect that there will be further improvements which we’ll be able to track using our Submission History feature.

Looking at the changes between provisional and finalised data

Now that the provisional and finalised data are published separately and we have copies of each version for a large proportion of the data, we can look at what changes occur when data is finalised. This will help us contextualise analyses on the OpenPrescribing Hospitals platform that use provisional data. We’ll show what we’ve found in a later post.

We’re pleased to see improvements in some of the data quality issues in the SCMD that we’ve highlighted previously. We’ll continue to investigate and surface any other data quality issues as we find them, please let us know if you see any and know anything about them!