We’d like to consider the number of prescriptions per practice. First of all, let us look at the distributions of numbers over the whole country.

In the above figure, we plot the histogram of the number of items. We can see that the distribution is very broad (note the logarithmic scales in both x and y), between 1 and 2.43310^{4}.

Below, we plot the location of each practice, with the colour denoting the number of items prescribed. Pracetices in the north east and south west (Cornwall) appear to be higher prescribing practices. More analysis is needed, but the suggestion is that practices in more rural areas are likely to be high prescribers. This could be due to the fact that they are serving larger numbers of people. It’s essential to know what the denominator is, in terms of number of patients/consultations. This, unfortunately is not in the data I have.