Government of Jersey

Community pharmacies

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by Employment, Social Security and Housing and published on 27 November 2025.
Prepared internally, no external costs.

Request 761176844

1. I would like to request a dataset containing monthly dispensing activity from community pharmacies in Jersey, with the following fields | Month | Year | Dispenser | Dispenser Address | Number of Items |
Specifically, I am seeking: The number of prescription items dispensed per month by each community pharmacy in Jersey. The dispenser's name and address. The month and year between 1st Jan 2024 and 31st July 2025.
2. I would like to request dataset containing annual dispensing activities from community pharmacies in Jersey. So total items dispensed between 1st Jan 2024 and 31st December 2024. The data set should contain just the total annual figures and doesn't need to be split by dispenser.

3. Are you able to share community pharmacy dispensing dataset available as first request was denied due to having to extract from multiple data sources.

Response

Q1.

Reason for non-disclosure

The requested information is exempt under Article 33 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, as its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of third parties and the Government of Jersey.

Disclosure of the volume of items dispensed by year, month and dispenser, including the address of the dispenser (hereto referred to as the pharmacy) would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of Pharmacies in Jersey, particularly smaller independent businesses. Ultimately this detrimental impact would also harm the commercial interests of the Government of Jersey who seek to achieve good value for money in public spending.

The volume of medicines dispensed is commercially sensitive because it could reveal details about the pharmacy's business performance and market share. Making this information public could disadvantage pharmacies in a competitive environment and undermine the Government of Jersey's ability to negotiate fair and cost-effective arrangements for dispensing and pharmaceutical services.

Therefore, the requested information is not disclosed considering:

the likelihood of harm to independent commercial businesses, and
for the potential impact on the Government of Jersey's ability to undertake commercial negotiations and achieve value for money

Q2 The number of items dispensed by community pharmacies in 2024 was 2,198,951.

The information requested in not held and therefore Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 applies. Under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, and in particular Article 3, public authorities are required to provide access to recorded information that they hold.

The Government of Jersey can confirm that the Law does not oblige public authorities to create new information, undertake data matching, or compile new datasets in order to respond to an information request. The duty is limited to providing information that already exists in recorded form.

Articles applied

Article 3- Meaning of “information held by a public authority"

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if –

(a) it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or

(b) it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

Article 33 - Commercial interests

Information is qualified exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes a trade secret; or

(b) its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of a person (including the scheduled public authority holding the information).

Public Interest Test
An exemption on the basis of commercial sensitivity is a 'conditional' exemption, which requires the Government of Jersey to also consider a public interest test.

While we recognise that there is a general public interest in transparency for the use of public funds, there is also a strong public interest in ensuring that pharmacies in Jersey can operate in a fair and competitive market. Disclosure of information regarding the number of items dispensed by each pharmacy could lead to commercial harm, reduce competition, and ultimately increase costs to the public sector. On balance, we have concluded that the public interest in withholding the information on the volumes of dispensing undertaken by individual pharmacies outweighs the public interest in disclosure.