OBJECTIVES: NHS GP Practice Prescribing Presentation-Level Data is a record of all prescribed medicines, dressings and appliances that are dispensed each month in England. Data are reported at the GP practice level and grouped by CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group). The research question was to determine whether any trends in expenditures for stoma care appliances at the CCG level could be detected using these publicly available data.

METHODS: Calculations are based on the reported Total Actual Cost (£) for Stoma Care Appliances (BNF Chapter 23) from September 2013 to September 2018. A total of 14,533,713 records were considered for inclusion. The analysis was limited to 212 (of a total of 390 CCGs in the data set) which reported a nonzero spend on stoma care appliances for all months under consideration. The measure of interest was the relative change in total monthly spend when compared to the same month of the previous year after adjustment for inflation. A log transformation was applied to help correct skewness in the data.

RESULTS: The data yielded 49 values of relative change in monthly spend from the previous year for each of 212 CCGs; a total of n = 10,388 data points. Overall, a mean increase of 3.27% in relative spending on stoma care appliances over the previous year was noted (p < .0001).

CONCLUSIONS: The data suggest that the total spend on stoma care appliances by the NHS has generally increased over the last five years. These results demonstrate that while ostomy costs are increasing, there is an opportunity for manufacturers to provide innovative solutions to arm clinicians with products supporting cost-effective clinical outcomes.