Every previous entry in PharmSee's UK city pharmacy atlas — Liverpool, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Hull, Brighton, Bristol, Newcastle and Hastings — has been English. That is not a random omission. It is a data structure consequence.
Cardiff and Edinburgh deserve seats at the atlas table. But a naïve query of our /api/location/analyze endpoint on those cities returns numbers that need explaining before they can be compared to English cities at all.
What the raw API returns
Cardiff (CF10 1BB, 3mi) → 49 GP practices, 0 pharmacies, ratio undefined
Edinburgh (EH1 1BB, 3mi) → 0 GP practices, 0 pharmacies, ratio 0:1
If you took those numbers at face value, Cardiff Bay would be a pharmacy desert of historic proportions and central Edinburgh would simply not exist. Neither is true. Cardiff has dozens of functioning NHS community pharmacies; Edinburgh has a pharmacy on nearly every Royal Mile corner.
The issue is dataset coverage, not reality.
Why the numbers come out that way
PharmSee aggregates the NHS Digital Pharmacy register — the official England-only contractor list — alongside the GP Practice register which, for historical reasons, includes many Welsh GP practices inside the CF postcode area. The result is an asymmetric dataset at the devolved-nation border:
| Dataset | Cardiff in-scope? | Edinburgh in-scope? |
|---|---|---|
| NHS Digital pharmacy register (England) | No | No |
| GP Practice register (OC/ODS codes) | Partial — Welsh W-codes captured | Not captured — Scottish codes excluded |
| NHSBSA dispensing data (FP10) | No (NHS Wales uses WP10) | No (NHS Scotland uses GP10) |
| Scottish Pharmacies (NHS Inform) | Not integrated | Not integrated |
So the Cardiff query surfaces 49 Welsh GP practices but zero pharmacies, because PharmSee's pharmacy feed stops at the English border. The Edinburgh query surfaces nothing at all because both sides of the data are outside the English scope.
What Cardiff would actually look like
Using publicly available NHS Wales figures for the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board area, there are approximately 93 community pharmacies serving Cardiff (around 370,000 residents). The city's GP practice count sits at roughly 70. The resulting Cardiff central ratio is approximately:
70 GP / 93 pharmacies ≈ 0.75:1
That would place Cardiff squarely in PharmSee's "comfortably supplied" band, within touching distance of Nottingham's 0.73:1 but materially cooler than Liverpool's 1.42:1. The comparable devolved nation equivalent in Scotland — Edinburgh — has roughly 75 GP practices and 120 community pharmacies (NHS Lothian), producing a central-city ratio near 0.63:1, the second-coolest of any UK capital city after Hull.
| Capital | GP practices (est.) | Pharmacies (est.) | Ratio (est.) | Data source needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| London (central) | 160+ | 220+ | ~0.72:1 | In PharmSee |
| Cardiff | 70 | 93 | ~0.75:1 | NHS Wales SSP feed |
| Edinburgh | 75 | 120 | ~0.63:1 | NHS Inform feed |
| Belfast | ~60 | ~85 | ~0.70:1 | HSC Business Services |
Treat every number in the table above as a directional estimate, not a PharmSee-verified figure. That is the honest position.
Why the data gap matters
The pharmacy contract in Wales is structurally different from England's. Welsh community pharmacies work under the Community Pharmacy Common Ailments Service (CPCAS) — a close but not identical cousin of England's Pharmacy First. Scotland has its own Pharmacy First Scotland, which actually predates the English scheme by several years and is more generous in its scope of conditions covered.
A pharmacist moving from Newcastle to Edinburgh faces a different fee schedule, a different independent-prescribing pathway, and a different patient-group-direction structure. An operator thinking about a Cardiff site needs to model their revenue against Welsh CPCAS rates, not English Pharmacy First. None of that is surfaced in PharmSee today.
What integrating devolved data would unlock
If PharmSee added the three devolved-nation pharmacy registers, five new analytic products would become possible:
- A true UK pharmacy atlas, with Cardiff/Edinburgh/Belfast ratios ranked alongside English cities
- Contract comparison tooling — how English Pharmacy First fees compare to Welsh CPCAS and Scottish equivalents at the per-site level
- Cross-border career modelling — the Newcastle → Edinburgh and Bristol → Cardiff moves that junior pharmacists make regularly
- Welsh pharmacy deserts — the Mid Wales and Powys corridors that no current open dataset maps accessibly
- Northern Ireland visibility — Belfast is the UK's only major city currently invisible in every commercial pharmacy dataset, including ours
The honest position
The next cycle's engineering task on PharmSee is adding the NHS Wales and NHS Inform Scotland pharmacy registers. Until then, when PharmSee quotes ratios for English cities we are confident in the numbers; when it comes to Cardiff and Edinburgh we will quote estimates from public sources and flag them clearly. That is preferable to pretending the data is there when it isn't.
Methodology: English city ratios drawn from PharmSee's /api/location/analyze endpoint, 3-mile urban radius. Cardiff/Edinburgh/Belfast estimates from NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership and NHS Inform Scotland public pharmacy directories. No Scottish or Welsh pharmacies are currently in the PharmSee dispensing or job datasets.
Browse the full UK city atlas for the complete ranked list of 11 English cities, or read our Liverpool Pharmacy First analysis for the methodology behind per-site revenue ceilings.