GLP-1 prescribing

Method note

The figures are NHS prescription items for four GLP-1 receptor agonists — tirzepatide, semaglutide, dulaglutide and liraglutide — written in England and dispensed in the community each month, as published by the NHS Business Services Authority. An item is one drug on one prescription form; it is not a patient, and one patient may have several items in a month. Tablets and injections of the same drug are counted together, because the source records the drug, not the form, at this level.

Two things are outside these figures. Private prescriptions are not in the dataset, and in the United Kingdom most tirzepatide supplied for weight loss has been private. And a prescription records no indication, so use for type 2 diabetes and for weight management cannot be separated: Mounjaro, generic tirzepatide and semaglutide serve both.

The SNOMED edition of the dataset begins in November 2020. Each month is published about seven weeks after it ends. The latest three months are read again on every run, so any revision the NHS Business Services Authority makes is recorded below.

Denmark's figures are the Danish Health Data Authority's count of people who bought each product on prescription in primary care in the month, from its monthly publication on weight-loss and diabetes medicines. They include privately paid prescriptions. They are given by brand — Wegovy and Ozempic are both semaglutide, Mounjaro is tirzepatide, Saxenda is liraglutide — and counts of fewer than five are suppressed by the authority. People are counted, not prescriptions, so Denmark's figures cannot be set against England's items; each card has its own scale.