PCN Clinical Pharmacist

The post holder is an experienced pharmacist, who acts within their professional boundaries, to develop, manage and mentor a team of pharmacists. The post holder will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role. The post holder will take responsibility for areas of chronic disease management within the practice and undertake clinical medication reviews to proactively manage patients with complex polypharmacy, especially for older people, people in residential care homes and those with multiple co-morbidities.

The post holder will provide primary support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medication queries. They will help support the repeat prescriptions system, deal with acute prescription requests, medicines reconciliation on transfer of care and systems for safer prescribing, providing expertise in clinical medicines advice while addressing both public and social care needs of patients in the GP practice.

Main duties of the job include:

• Seeing patients in multimorbidity clinics and in partnership with primary healthcare colleagues and implementing improvements to patients' medicines, including deprescribing.
• Managing own caseload and running long-term condition clinics where responsible for prescribing as an independent prescriber for conditions where medicines have a large component (e.g. medicine optimisation for stable angina symptom control, warfarin monitoring and dose adjustment for patients requiring long-term anticoagulants).
• Reviewing the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation).
• Undertaking clinical medication reviews with patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy and implementing own prescribing changes (as an independent prescriber) and ordering relevant monitoring tests.
• Managing own caseload of care home residents and working with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
• Providing patient-facing clinics for those with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines.
• Providing a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines.
• Providing out of hours/on-call/extended services for the practice and the patients.
• Answering all medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.
• Devising and implementing practice searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an unplanned admission and readmissions from medicines.
• Reconciling medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes, including identifying and rectifying unexplained changes.
• Producing and implementing a practice repeat prescribing policy.
• Providing education and training to the primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.

Person Specification includes:

• Mandatory registration with General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC).
• Independent prescriber or working towards/intent of gaining an independent prescribing qualification.
• Membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
• Minimum of 5 years post-qualification experience.
• Excellent interpersonal, influencing and negotiating skills.
• Ability to work under pressure/in stressful situations.

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 to check for any previous criminal convictions.