Enhanced Prescribing Database

The Enhanced Prescribing Database (EPD) covers drugs prescribed in primary care and dispensed by community pharmacies. Prescriptions are submitted to the Business Services Organisation (BSO) by community pharmacies for payment. The EPD includes prescriptions issued by all types of prescribers including doctors and nurses, and all those issued and dispensed by pharmacists, dispensing doctors and appliance suppliers. Only prescriptions that are subsequently dispensed and processed by BSO for payment are included in the EPD. Patient information is not captured for all prescriptions. Only prescription forms with barcodes that were successfully read have patient Health and Care Numbers (HCN) recorded. Consequently datasets containing prescription information linked to patient HCN will not give a count of the total number of items prescribed during the time period. Rather it contains all relevant items prescribed during the time period for which the patient details were known.