Clinical Pharmacist

The post holder will provide primary support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medicines management. They will help support the repeat prescription system, deal with acute prescription requests, and 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(s). They will deliver an efficient, cost-effective, and high-quality clinical service by providing clinical and professional development to the clinical workforce within K&W Healthcare & member practices. The post holder will ensure that the practice integrates with community and hospital pharmacy to help utilise skill mix, improve patient outcomes, ensure better access to healthcare, and help manage workload. The role is pivotal to improving the quality of care and operational efficiencies so requires motivation and passion to deliver excellent service within general practice.

The post-holder will deliver a comprehensive range of high-quality pharmaceutical services, to include the assessment of patients at K&W sites, practices, care homes and as required attend housebound patients. They will be able to consult on the telephone, via the internet and face to face.

Main duties of the job

• Clinical reviews/input
• QOF targets
• Audits
• Public Health

About us: Primary Care networks are newly formed groups of GP practices working collaboratively to provide enhanced and diverse services to patients. They are evolving and receiving government investment to support their development. This is an exciting time to join PCNs with the range of services and additional roles, only increasing over the next few years. We have a dynamic team working across our practices and being part of a wider team across our organisation greater mean of support, swapping ideas and clinical supervision makes the experience all the better. This is an excellent opportunity to join our team. Our main criteria are for enthusiastic, flexible individuals. The post holder will act within their professional boundaries, working within a fast-paced organisation.

Job responsibilities

• Demonstrate a significant reduction in the amount of GP time spent (especially locum GP time) by seeing patients in appointment slots for clinical medication reviews, respond to urgent medication requests and queries.
• Complex patients or those with additional needs may require longer appointment slots.
• Review the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines.
• Ensuring they get the best use of their medicines.
• Minor ailments triage: Managing caseload of patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments requesting GP appointments and triaging patients appropriately.
• Provide patient facing clinics for those patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medication in order to improve medication adherence.
• Minor ailments appointment slots patient ages 2-70, weekday mornings, 7 - 15 minute appointments for minor ailment consultations.
• Contribute to multidisciplinary reviews about medication related issues.
• Reconcile medicines following hospital discharge.
• Review daily pathology results for selected patients on known medicines.
• Targeted medication reviews particularly in high risk patients (frail elderly, poly-pharmacy, renal and hepatic impairment, high risk medicines etc.).
• Undertake clinical medication review with patients and produce recommendations for the nurses and GPs on prescribing.
• Support practices with management of patients with drug dependence and alcohol related disorders.
• Signpost patients to other services or sources of information in addition to medication information when necessary in order to improve the general health and wellbeing of patients.
• Make appropriate recommendations to the senior clinical pharmacist or GPs for medicines improvement.

Audits and Risk Stratification

• Increase quality and safety of prescribing through regular K&W audits and practice-specific audits.
• Implement drug withdrawals and alerts e.g. MHRA aimed at improving medicines safety.
• Implementing medication related NICE guidelines.
• Identification of cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through practice computer searches.

Repeat prescribing process

• Link with community and hospital pharmacy about discharges and repeat prescribing queries.
• Improve the repeat prescribing process within K&W practices by working extensively with dispensing community pharmacy.
• Communicating with them more effectively about medication queries.
• Implement and manage the repeat dispensing process.
• Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing requests for repeat prescriptions and medicines reaching review dates.
• Syncing patients medication to reduce wastage, DMD corrections to facilitate EPS.
• Help improve the processes for monitoring and prescribing high-risk drugs (especially warfarin and methotrexate).
• Ensure all practices have a repeat prescribing policy and all staff are aware and are adhering to it.
• Improve the quality, safety and cost effectiveness of prescribing by liaising with GPs and/or other non-medical prescribers to action MM recommendation.
• Be a source of medicines information for all of the K&W practice teams and patients (e.g. around doses, side effects, adverse events, possible alternatives e.g. around out of stocks).
• Working with GPs to ensure medicines management audits, prescribing recommendations and targets are up-to-date.
• Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.
• Liaising with other pharmacy teams including CCG medicines management team to obtain practice specific prescribing data and information on other local prescribing initiatives guidance.
• Encourage practices to work in line with the NWL integrated formulary.
• Encourage regular locums to work in line with locally agreed guidance.
• Empower other K & W Healthcare staff to contribute to good quality medicines management for member practices and care homes.
• Work with general practice team to ensure that the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.

Signposting

• Ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate period of time e.g. pathology results, common/minor ailments, acute conditions, long term condition reviews etc.

Public Health

• To support public health campaigns.
• To provide specialist knowledge on all public health programs available to general practice.

Maintaining an open door policy throughout the day unless consulting with a patient. K&W & practice personnel can contact the clinical pharmacist for any medication advice and urgent issues that they feel are appropriate. Booking patients in Practice sessions will be set-up on an agreed day(s) of the week. Admin and GPs can directly book in patients and telephone consults. GPs can also directly book patients requiring pharmacist interventions into sessions. An overview (brief) will be developed about the clinical pharmacist role and the appropriate types of patients that can be booked into sessions.

Other duties

• Assist with the implementation of the various local and national frameworks and strategies which aim to improve the quality and provision of care to patients.
• Work in conjunction with other professionals to ensure clinical, management and administration teams are working in partnership to provide the provision of patient centred care.
• Participate in the development and implementation of systems for use by colleagues.
• Contribute to the development and implementation of clinical pathways to ensure a streamlined service is delivered.
• Contribute to new initiatives and ways of working to deliver the core services, maximising the potential to effectively provide a high-quality service.
• Be responsible for personal and professional practice and development, ensuring registration with the relevant regulatory bodies and compliance with the code of professional conduct at all times.
• Regularly reflect on clinical practice to ensure a satisfactory training standard is maintained.
• Advise patients within the limits of their competence, recognising when to seek help.
• When they are not able to advise the patient in a safe and skilled manner, or when necessary, the post-holder will ask advice from a more experienced colleague or duty doctor or clinical service lead.
• Assist with the education of callers in the correct use of the service and other health-related organisations.

This list is not exhaustive and the time spent on each will vary on a daily and weekly basis. The post holder will be responsible for managing their time appropriately to make sure that each role work stream is delivered on time.

Person Specification

• A university degree Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degree and a one year pre-registration training course in pharmacy completed.
• Accredited by General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC).
• Relevant A level and GCSE (grade A to C).
• Ideally 2 years of experience in General Practice.
• Disclosure and Barring Service Check: 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.