Analgesics: Prescriptions
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an estimate of recent trends in the number of people prescribed pain medication in the last 12 months.
Answered by Karin Smyth
The Prescription Cost Analysis data release gives items and quantities of each medicine dispensed in the community in England. The following table shows the total number of items dispensed for analgesics in England, regardless of where prescribed, as well as the unique number of patients that were dispensed medicines listed in British National Formulary (BNF) Section 4.7 Analgesics, from December 2023 to November 2024:
Month and year | Total number of items | Unique identified patients |
December 2023 | 5,000,000 | 3,100,000 |
January 2024 | 5,200,000 | 3,200,000 |
February 2024 | 4,800,000 | 3,100,000 |
March 2024 | 4,900,000 | 3,100,000 |
April 2024 | 5,100,000 | 3,200,000 |
May 2024 | 5,200,000 | 3,200,000 |
June 2024 | 4,800,000 | 3,100,000 |
July 2024 | 5,200,000 | 3,200,000 |
August 2024 | 5,000,000 | 3,100,000 |
September 2024 | 4,900,000 | 3,100,000 |
October 2024 | 5,200,000 | 3,200,000 |
November 2024 | 5,000,000 | 3,200,000 |
Total | 60,400,000 | 7,500,000 |
For further information, BNF 4.7 includes:
- non-opioid analgesics and compound preparations;
- opioid analgesics;
- neuropathic pain medicines; and
- antimigraine medicines.
No data has been captured relating to the clinical indication a prescription is intended for. Some of these products can be used for a variety of clinical indications and therefore the figures provided may include items that were prescribed for a different condition, rather than for pain relief.
It is important to note that this data does not capture medicines classified elsewhere within the BNF, which are primarily used for other reasons, but may also be used for analgesic purposes. This includes, for example, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which feature in 10.1 ‘Drugs used in rheumatic diseases and gout’, and antidepressants, used off-label in chronic primary pain, which feature in 4.3 ‘Antidepressant drugs’.
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