UK NHS Prescribing Data API: GP Drug Trends for England, Scotland, Wales & NI

Monthly GP prescribing for any medicine, across all four UK nations, in one clean dataset. Type a drug name (semaglutide, tirzepatide, apixaban), a brand (Mounjaro, Ozempic) or a BNF code, and get items, quantity, net ingredient cost and actual cost by nation, NHS region, ICB or health board, sub ICB location, or individual GP practice. The actor also finds the biggest movers: the areas or practices with the largest month on month change.

• Official open data only: NHSBSA (England), Public Health Scotland, NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership and the Business Services Organisation (Northern Ireland).
• No API key, no login, no 8 GB monthly CSV downloads on your side.
• One normalised schema for all four nations.

What you get

Record	What it contains
trend	One row per drug × area (or practice) × month: items, quantity, net ingredient cost (NIC), actual cost, cost per item, and change vs the previous month
mover	Areas or practices with the largest change in items between the two latest months, with % change, cost change, direction, a newPrescriber flag and a one line alert
summary	One per drug: latest month per nation, totals, month on month and period change, top 5 areas, biggest riser and faller

Real sample: tirzepatide (Mounjaro), largest area in each nation, from a test run on 23 Oct 2026

nation	month	areaName	items	quantity	netIngredientCost	actualCost	vs prev month
England	Aug 2026	NHS North East and North Cumbria ICB	22,571	23,330	£5,106,687	£5,090,554	down 5.0%
Scotland	Jul 2026	NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde	5,390	6,152	£1,382,969	n/a	+2.7%
Wales	Jul 2026	Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board	4,960	5,149	£1,088,993	£1,034,387	+9.8%
Northern Ireland	Aug 2026	Belfast (LCG area)	2,370	2,469	£516,465	£516,465	down 7.2%

Real sample: biggest movers (rank 1 per nation, same run)

nation	drug	area	previous items	items	change
England	tirzepatide	NHS Greater Manchester ICB	18,493	17,113	down 1,380 (down 7.5%)
Scotland	semaglutide	NHS Lothian	4,764	5,010	+246 (+5.2%)
Wales	tirzepatide	Swansea Bay University Health Board	3,723	4,256	+533 (+14.3%)
Northern Ireland	tirzepatide	Western	2,127	1,826	down 301 (down 14.2%)

Latest month national totals in the same run: tirzepatide 342,252 items / £80.2m NIC in England (Aug 2026), 22,881 items in Wales and 14,268 in Scotland (Jul 2026), 9,352 in Northern Ireland (Aug 2026).

Sample trend item (JSON)

{"recordType": "trend", "drug": "tirzepatide", "bnfCodes": ["0601023AZ"], "bnfChemicalNames": ["Tirzepatide"], "nation": "Wales",
 "level": "icb", "month": "2026-07", "regionCode": "W92000004", "regionName": "Wales", "areaCode": "7A1",
 "areaName": "Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board", "items": 4960, "quantity": 5149.0, "netIngredientCost": 1088993.0,
 "actualCost": 1034387.0, "costPerItem": 219.56, "itemsChangeVsPrevMonth": 442, "itemsChangePctVsPrevMonth": 9.8,
 "source": "NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership (NWSSP), GP Prescribing Data Extract",
 "attribution": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership, GP Prescribing Data Extract."}

Use cases

• GLP 1 and weight loss jab tracking: follow Mounjaro (tirzepatide), Wegovy and Ozempic (semaglutide) uptake month by month, by ICB or health board, and see where prescribing is rising fastest.
• Market access and brand teams: check uptake after a NICE decision or a formulary change, compare ICBs and health boards, and find the high prescribing practices.
• Generics and wholesalers: size volumes and spend for a molecule before or after loss of exclusivity, and spot switching between presentations.
• Analysts, investors and journalists: a reproducible monthly feed for charts and stories without downloading the raw files.
• Med comms and CROs: target areas by prescribing density.

Input

Field	What it does	Default
Drugs or BNF codes	Chemical or brand names, a 9 character BNF chemical code (0601023AW), a presentation code prefix, or a shorter section prefix (0601023)	semaglutide, tirzepatide
Nations	all, or any of england, scotland, wales, northern_ireland	all
Level	national, region, icb, subicb, practice	icb
Area filter	Match on region, ICB or health board, sub ICB, practice name or code, or postcode prefix	none
Months	Latest N published months per nation (or give exact months)	6
Mode	both, trend or movers	both
Movers level, per nation, minimum items, direction	Tune the movers list	ICB, 20, 20 items, both
Max trend rows	Hard cap. The biggest prescribers come first, so a cap keeps the rows that matter	5,000
Combine drugs	Add all drugs into one series (e.g. a GLP 1 total)	off

Example: Mounjaro by GP practice in Greater Manchester, last 6 months, with the top 20 practice movers

{"drugs": ["tirzepatide"], "nations": ["england"], "level": "practice", "areaFilter": ["Greater Manchester"], "months": 6, "moversLevel": "practice", "topMovers": 20}

Example: GLP 1 total by health board and ICB across the UK

{"drugs": ["semaglutide", "tirzepatide", "liraglutide", "dulaglutide"], "combineDrugs": true, "nations": ["all"], "level": "icb", "months": 12}

How geography maps across the nations

Level	England	Scotland	Wales	Northern Ireland
region	NHS England region	Scotland	Wales	Northern Ireland
icb	Integrated Care Board	Health board	Health board	Local Commissioning Group area
subicb	Sub ICB location	Health and Social Care Partnership	Locality (code only)	LCG area
practice	Practice or cost centre	GP practice	GP practice	GP practice

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	Per 1,000
Run start (apify-actor-start)	$0.02 per run
result-row: one monthly trend row	$0.002	$2 per 1,000 rows
mover-alert: one biggest mover record	$0.01	$10 per 1,000

Summary records carry no charge.

Examples:

• Semaglutide and tirzepatide, all four nations, ICB and health board level, 3 months, 5 movers per nation (the test run above: 380 rows and 40 movers): about $1.18.
• One drug, England, ICB level, 6 months: roughly 230 rows, so about $0.50 plus movers.
• One drug, every GP practice in England, 1 month: about 6,100 rows, about $12. Use areaFilter or maxRows to keep practice level runs small.

Data sources, licence and attribution

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Nation	Source	Latest month on 23 Oct 2026
England	NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), English Prescribing Dataset (EPD), via the NHSBSA Open Data Portal	August 2026
Scotland	Public Health Scotland, Prescriptions in the Community (data by prescriber location)	July 2026
Wales	NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership, GP Prescribing Data Extract	July 2026
Northern Ireland	Business Services Organisation, GP Prescribing Data, via OpenDataNI	August 2026

Every row carries its own source and attribution fields. This actor is independent. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by NHSBSA, Public Health Scotland, NWSSP, BSO, the NHS or any government department. The data contains no patient level information. It covers organisations (practices and NHS areas) only.

Notes and known limits

• Nations publish at different times: England and Northern Ireland are about 2 months behind, Scotland and Wales about 3. "Latest 6 months" means the latest 6 for each nation. UK total rows only appear for months that all four nations have published.
• Costs are not identical across nations. England and Wales publish NIC and actual cost. Northern Ireland publishes gross and actual cost (reported here as NIC and actual cost). Scotland publishes gross ingredient cost only (actualCost is null).
• Items are dispensed items in the community. Hospital only and private prescriptions are not included. Monthly totals move with the number of dispensing days in the month.
• England includes non practice cost centres (for example community diabetes services) and a small "UNIDENTIFIED" bucket. Scotland includes a small number of unallocated prescriber codes.
• Practices that merge or change name keep their code, so movers are matched on code.
• Wales locality names and NI sub areas are not published in the source files, so they come back as codes or LCG names.

FAQ

How is this different from OpenPrescribing? OpenPrescribing is an excellent public website for England. This actor gives you a machine readable feed for all four UK nations at once, with movers and summaries, that you can schedule and push into Sheets, BI tools or a webhook.

Can I search by brand name? Yes. Brand names that appear in BNF presentation names (Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus) resolve to the underlying chemical, so all brands and generics of that chemical are counted.

How do I get alerts when new data lands? Schedule a monthly run around the 25th with mode: movers. Each run compares the two latest months.

Does it include patient data? No. The sources publish aggregate counts by practice and area only.

Keywords: NHS prescribing data API, English Prescribing Dataset, EPD, GP prescribing data, OpenPrescribing alternative, Mounjaro prescribing, semaglutide prescribing, GLP 1 prescriptions UK, ICB prescribing, Scotland prescriptions in the community, Wales GP prescribing, Northern Ireland GP prescribing.