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Community Pharmacy Clinical Services Dataset: GDPR information

Summary

Why and how we process your data in the Community Pharmacy Clinical Services Dataset and your rights.

Controller NHS England is a ‘joint controller’ with the Department of Health and Social Care
How we use the information (processing activities)

NHS England collects and analyses data about the care given to patients when they access community pharmacy services, such as:

  • the type of consultation you had with the pharmacist e.g. face to face or by telephone
  • the reason for your visit to the pharmacy
  • any medicines you were supplied
  • if you were referred to another NHS service, such as to your GP, 111 or to A&E

This collection of data is called the Community Pharmacy Clinical Services Dataset. 

We will pseudonymise the data, then analyse and link it to other data we collect to:

  • Understand if community pharmacies are delivering the services as they should be and are meeting the requirements of the service specification for each pharmacy service
  • understand the impact these services have on the wider NHS
  • understand how patients use different parts of the NHS for their care, and how their health is affected by this
  • identify potential issues with data quality, fraudulent activity or patient safety issues
  • tell us which other services could and should be provided in community pharmacies
  • help us design healthcare that the people using it need and that this care is delivered by different organisations working well together
  • assist NHS England to work closely with ICBs and support them to make sure community pharmacies are delivering high quality care within their region, check how they are doing compared to other ICBs, make decisions based on knowledge of how services are performing and reduce waste
Does this contain sensitive (special category) data such as health information? Yes
Who are recipients of this data?

NHSE shares this data with:

  • integrated care boards (ICBs)
  • NHS Business Services Authority

Data from this collection may be shared with organisations for planning, commissioning and research purposes through NHS England’s Data Access Request Service and recorded on our data release register.
 
Is data transferred outside the UK? This data is not transferred out of the UK
How long the data is kept The data will be held for as long as we have a legal basis and purpose to retain it
Our lawful basis for holding this data Legal obligation
Your rights
  • Tick Be informed
  • Tick Get access to it
  • Tick Rectify or change it
  • Cross Erase or remove it
  • Tick Restrict or stop processing it
  • Cross Move, copy or transfer it
  • Cross Object to it being processed or used
  • Cross Know if a decision was made by a computer rather than a person
How can you withdraw your consent?

Consent not the basis for processing.
Is the data subject to decisions made solely by computers? (automated decision making) No
Where does this data come from? NHS Business Services Authority
The legal basis for collecting this data

Legal obligation (Delegation of NHS England Direct Commissioning Functions - Evaluation and Monitoring of Services Directions 2026).

Where we use this data

internal

Community Pharmacy Clinical Services Dataset

NHS England is collecting data from NHS Business Services Authority (BSA) to enable the analysis of patient level clinical activity and medicines data, relating to pharmaceutical services delivered to patients under the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF), in order to provide a comprehensive and comparable national patient level data set for planning, commissioning and research purposes.

For more information, see the full transparency notice for this collection.