Clinical Pharmacist (Maternity cover) in Lichfield

An opportunity has arisen for a Clinical Pharmacist to support the PCN(s) and practices in high quality patient focussed pharmacy services. The successful candidate is a Clinical Pharmacist who is enthusiastic, highly motivated and key to delivering high quality patient care, medicine optimisation, pharmacy queries and support to pharmacy teams. The PCN Network team already has excellent links with the PCN practices, local hospital, community pharmacies and care homes in the area, so you would be truly part of a larger team working for better patient care.

Main duties of the job

• Patient facing Long-term condition clinics - where appropriate patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required e.g. COPD, asthma. Review 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. Make appropriate recommendations to Senior Pharmacists or GPs for medicine improvement.
• Patient facing Clinical Medication Review - Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for senior clinical pharmacist, nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.
• Telephone medicine support.
• Patient facing domiciliary clinical medication review - Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacists, nurses and GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.
• Management of common/minor/self-limiting ailments - Signposting to community pharmacy and referring to GPs or other healthcare professionals where appropriate.
• Management of medicines at discharge from hospital - To reconcile medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes, including identifying and rectifying unexplained changes and working with patients and community pharmacists to ensure patients receive the medicines they need post discharge.

About us

Lichfield and Burntwood GP Network Ltd was formed in 2018 and has evolved into two distinct but closely linked Primary Care Networks. The practices work closely together enabling greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care for our communities. They are meeting the ambitions in the NHS Long Term Plan. We cover a patient population of over 78,000 and have a team of over 26 wte people working across and in the PCN practices. A Pharmacy team meeting takes place each month about pharmacy issues and developments along with a quarterly staff meeting.

Job responsibilities

• Patient facing Long-term condition clinics - where appropriate patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required e.g. COPD, asthma. Review 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). Make appropriate recommendations to Senior Pharmacists or GPs for medicine improvement.
• Patient facing Clinical Medication Review - Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for senior clinical pharmacist, nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.
• Patient facing care home medication reviews - Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacist, nurses or GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
• Patient facing domiciliary clinical medication review - Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacists, nurses and GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.
• Management of common/minor/self-limiting ailments - Signposting to community pharmacy and referring to GPs or other healthcare professionals where appropriate.
• Patient facing medicines support - Provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice.
• Telephone medicines support - Provide a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.
• Medicine information to practice staff and patients - Answers relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams e.g. community pharmacy and patients with queries about medicines. Suggesting and recommending solutions. Providing follow up for patients to monitor the effect of any changes.
• Unplanned hospital admissions - Review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions through audit and individual patient reviews. Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
• Management of medicines at discharge from hospital - To reconcile medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes, including identifying and rectifying unexplained changes and working with patients and community pharmacists to ensure patients receive the medicines they need post discharge. Set up and manage systems to ensure continuity of medicines supply to high-risk groups of patients e.g. those with medicine compliance aids or those in care homes.
• 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.
• Repeat prescribing - Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and flagging up those needing a review. Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.
• Risk Stratification - Identification of cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through pre-pared practice computer searches. This might include risks that are patient related, medicine related or both.
• Service development - Contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have medicinal components e.g. advice on treatment pathways and patient information leaflets.
• Information management - Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision-making.
• Medicines quality improvement - Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the practice team.
• Medicines safety - Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.
• Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations - Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economies RAG list and make recommendations to GPs for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors (red drugs) or subject to shared care (amber drugs). Assist practices in seeing and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on the practices computer system. Auditing practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance. Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.
• Education and Training - Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.
• Care Quality Commission - Work with the general practice team to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
• Public health - To support public health campaigns. To provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the public.

Person Specification

• Qualifications

• Registered with the General Pharmaceutical Council GPhC
• Masters degree in pharmacy MPharm or equivalent
• Qualified as an independent prescriber
• Membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society or working towards Faculty membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society
• Specialist knowledge acquired through post-graduate diploma or equivalent training/experience

• Experience

• Working knowledge of GP IT systems including EMIS, Docman
• Experience of working with operational teams, cross organisations and a range of professionals
• 2 years GP - Primary Care experience

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.