Last review date 07/08/2023

Many Ardens templates contain pricing information.  This can be helpful when there are multiple products with similar ingredients and no difference in the clinical effect.  Providing this information supports prescribers to get the best value for the NHS, while still delivering the best patient care.  

In some cases, national guidance is to prescribe the most cost effective option, so an awareness of the price is in fact needed to follow the guidelines fully e.g. NICE for Urgency incontinence in women recommends "drug with lowest acquisition cost."

The BNF contains two prices - what's the difference?

The Drug Tariff is updated on a monthly basis on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care and outlines drug and appliance prices that pharmacies will be paid for NHS prescriptions, amongst other things.  

The NHS indicative price is the price the NHS pays for drugs and medicines that are purchased centrally or the manufacturer's listed price.

Ardens template prices are checked quarterly against the online Drug Tariff and the listed price for branded products, therefore prices may be higher or lower than the price that the pharmacy are able to purchase the product from the wholesaler.

The price in the Drug Tariff only applies to prescriptions written generically or the specified brand eg. Fostair below.  A prescription for another branded belometasone/formoterol inhaler eg. Luforbec will attract reimbursement at the listed price for Luforbec.

The price on the template doesn't match the Drug Tariff or listed price?

On some occasions, we have calculated the price for a course, or for a set amount of days so that fair comparisons can be made between medications.  For example, if one puff a day is taken from an inhaler it will last twice as long compared to someone using the same inhaler two puffs a day, and therefore will cost half as much.  We've taken this into account so the prices shown clearly demonstrate which device costs more in use at the prescribed dose.

For templates eligible for localisation, see support article, Pro practices should see their formulary choices enabled when they first open the template, so published prices work together with your local formulary.

Due to space restrictions, we have rounded to the nearest pound below:

Another example of where we have calculated a price that may appear different to the Drug Tariff price for one pack, is the Vitamin D Formulary. Here we list the cost for the course of the loading dose. On the maintenance pages we list the price for one month at the prescribed dosage. In all cases, there is a line of text to explain how the prices displayed have been calculated.

Not every template hosts prices, as this would be impractical.  Other occasions where a drug is significantly more expensive than other options is demonstrated by ££.  Cost isn't the only consideration when prescribing so we've taken a pragmatic approach to where the information is most useful and how much space is devoted to cost on templates. 

Pricing on templates is included as an indication only, and should never replace a prescriber's own knowledge or clinical decision.

Please email medicines-systmone@ardens.org.uk if you have any questions or feedback.