Meet the team
Alison Worden
Delivery Manager, Acute Pharmacy & Medicines Optimisation Dataset
About the dataset
The Pharmacy and Medicines Optimisation dataset provides national insight into the performance, capacity and strategic direction of pharmacy services across the NHS. It benchmarks workforce, finance, service delivery, digital maturity and clinical pharmacy activity to identify variation, highlight best practice and support system-wide improvement in medicines optimisation.
The data reflects a service balancing financial pressures, medicines supply challenges and workforce transformation, while continuing to shift from a predominantly dispensing model towards enhanced clinical and patient-facing care.
Our outputs highlight opportunities for organisations to optimise medicines use, strengthen workforce sustainability and advance the delivery of high-quality, patient-centred pharmacy services.
New metric
Dispensing and checking times
Using workforce hours dedicated to dispensing and checking alongside prescription lines dispensed, the dataset now calculates the average time for dispensing and the average time for checking.
Who uses it?
Primarily Chief Pharmacists and wider pharmacy teams including pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and pharmacy assistants with outputs also of interest to trust boards.
Members compare their service with peers nationally on workforce, medicines spend and service delivery.
Key themes
Medicines costs
Medicines spend
CIP targets
Medical gases
Prescription turnaround
Homecare
Dispensing
Service delivery
Medicines information
Clinical pharmacy
Dedicated resource
Prescribers
Stock and procurement
Order numbers
Line numbers
Medicines shortages
Medicines Safety
Workforce
Workforce size
Skill mix
Vacancy rate
Also covered
Digital, medicines information, antimicrobials, research and clinical trials, medicines safety and virtual wards.