National therapeutic indicators data visualisation
Data to September 2025
An Official Statistics publication for Scotland
- Published
- 27 January 2026 (Latest release)
- Type
- Statistical report
- Author
- Public Health Scotland
About this release
This quarterly release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) is an update of the National Therapeutic Indicators (NTIs) based on data for prescriptions prescribed and reimbursed by the NHS up to 30 September 2025. Ensuring quality and effective prescribing is a key priority area for NHS Scotland, delivering improvements to patient safety, person-centred care and cost-effective use of medicines. The NTIs support this work, using prescription data to provide a measure of prescribing activity across NHS Boards, Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs), GP clusters and GP practices. This allows prescribers and prescribing advisors to assess the impact of changes to prescribing practice to deliver improvements to patient safety, effective care and efficient spending.
Main points
There are currently 75 primary care, and 17 secondary care prescribing indicators detailed in the publication, one of which we select each quarter to demonstrate the data that is available and how it can be used to monitor prescribing practice.
The data visualisation allows a more in-depth and interactive visual analysis of the current NTIs as defined by the Effective Prescribing and Therapeutics Division of the Scottish Government.
The visualisation includes a presentation of variation and prescribing trends, and comparisons of HSCP, GP clusters and practice peer groups. This update also provides a practice level dashboard showing comparisons between indicators, HSCP trends and an NHS Board indicator summary. Prescribing trends for hospital prescribing is also presented at NHS Board level.
This interactive visualisation allows the user to look at the variation in prescribing practice between GP practices and will be useful to both prescribers and associated prescribing staff who want an 'easy to access' visualisation view of prescribing data.
The indicator chosen to highlight this quarter relates to prescribing of amoxicillin. This indicator, shown below, presents the proportion of five-day courses of amoxicillin prescribed as a proportion of all amoxicillin prescriptions. Amoxicillin is an antibiotic commonly prescribed for respiratory infections, and NICE guidance recommends five days' treatment for most common community respiratory infections. This is to ensure that antibiotics are not taken longer than is clinically necessary, and to slow the development of antimicrobial resistance. The chart below shows that the number of 5-day course amoxicillin prescriptions as a percentage of all amoxicillin prescriptions (items) has increased over time, from 70% in July to September 2023 to 76% in July to September 2025. This suggests improved compliance from prescribers with the antibiotic prescribing policies.
Background
This is the latest release of the data visualisation and further developments will follow, as prioritised by a steering group for this work which is commissioned by the Effective Prescribing and Therapeutics division of the Scottish Government.
An accompanying dashboard view displaying NTIs for disease areas including diabetes and Chronic Pain alongside already published corresponding admissions, prevalence and demographics data is also available.
Further information
The next release of this publication will be April 2026.
General enquiries
If you have an enquiry relating to this publication, please contact David Scott at phs.prescribing@phs.scot.
Media enquiries
If you have a media enquiry relating to this publication, please contact the Communications and Engagement team.
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Older versions of this publication
Versions of this publication released before 16 March 2020 may be found on the Data and Intelligence, Health Protection Scotland or Improving Health websites.