Medicines Manager - Central Lakes (Sickness Cover) in Ambleside

We are looking for short-term cover for Medicines Management. Due to the short term and immediate nature of this cover, having prior experience of medicines management would be preferred but is not essential. The role is focused on ensuring safe prescribing within the surgery. This includes:

• Requesting medication for patients
• Managing patients' medication records including repeat dispensing
• Acting upon safety alerts
• Optimising prescribing for cost and efficacy
• Processing discharge and medication changes from secondary care
• Other reasonable and related administration

This role is 20 hours per week for a fixed term period of 3 months, with the potential for this to be extended.

Main duties of the job include:

• Being the main provision of an efficient, patient-friendly repeat prescribing, audits, stocktake and ordering of vaccines and medical consumables.
• Contributing to the efficiency and quality improvement of the service to both patients and clinicians by putting into place processes that minimise the chance of error, reduce medicine wastage, and improve the quality and accuracy of the practice repeat prescriptions.

All staff are expected to work to Cumbria Health Values:

• Clinically focused - Everything every one of us does is for the patient
• Responsive - We listen, and we respond quickly in a patient-focused way
• One Team - We work together to provide a high-quality service which is organised and consistent, and in partnership with both the local Acute and Community Trusts
• High Standards - We provide skilled professionals working to the highest standards who are passionate about improving patient care
• Growth & Sustainability - With our strong roots we will continue to thrive and grow
• Communities - Connecting and engaging to meet local needs

About us: Cumbria Health on Call (CH) places the patient, their family and their community at the heart of everything we do. We are an award-winning organisation, the first out-of-hours organisation in the country to be rated as outstanding by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). We provide primary health care services, both in and out of hours, across Cumbria. We are values-driven and place great emphasis on inclusivity and the wellbeing and development of our staff, while striving to provide a consistently high-quality service. Our service is designed to improve health and wellbeing.

Working for CH can offer flexible opportunities in terms of location, hours and working patterns so you can enjoy a great work-life balance. In order to provide the best patient care we understand the importance of ensuring staff satisfaction and are consistently trying to ensure we offer our staff a positive working environment whether that be through training or social events.

Job responsibilities include:

• Requesting medication for patients
• Liaising with local pharmacies to ensure that prescription requests get actioned, to manage supply and issuing problems, and to work closely where there are concerns with usage of patients.
• Managing the safety alerts into the practice, ensuring that these are actioned with GPs for the safety of patients.
• Managing medication optimisation, working closely with the clinical lead and all prescribers, to be defaulting to cost-effective alternatives to save the NHS money.
• Monitoring usage of certain prescriptions and working with clinicians to improve efficacy and safety (e.g. opiate prescribing).
• Receiving and actioning hospital discharges, so that patients have an accurate record of the prescriptions that they are on and are swiftly able to access prescribed medication.
• Running searches, contacting patients, and arranging suitable follow-up appointments as appropriate.
• Other reasonable administration and medicines management tasks not covered above.

Person Specification:

• Qualifications: GCSE grade A to C in English and Maths (or equivalent), ECDL or equivalent, NVQ Business Administration.
• Knowledge: Previous experience working within the NHS, previous experience in a similar role, knowledge of prescribing processes.
• Skills and Aptitudes: Excellent oral and written communication skills, excellent telephone manner, ability to prioritise & manage own workload, friendly, helpful and can-do approach, ability to carry out work accurately to specified deadlines, excellent organisational skills, ability to work on own initiative, able to work under pressure, able to maintain a high level of confidentiality.
• Other Requirements: Willingness to undertake further training, positive, confident, well organised, good team player, flexible, ability to build rapport and effective relationships at all levels, demonstrate initiative, ability to maintain workload in a sometimes busy and demanding environment.

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.