Clinical Pharmacist - General Practice

The successful applicant will be a qualified Pharmacist with valid GPhC registration and responsible for supporting the Practice GPs in their prescribing, prescription management, systems, and medicine management, identifying areas for improvement and initiating and managing change. An Independent Prescriber qualification, recognised by the GPhC is desirable for this role, along with a special interest in Respiratory care.

You will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role and 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.

Providing primary support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medication queries, helping 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.

The post holder will provide clinical leadership on medicines optimisation and quality improvement and manage some aspects of the quality and outcomes framework and enhanced services.

About us: MyHealth are a well-established, innovative, high achieving, training and research active practice. We have four branch surgeries located in picturesque, semi-rural area just north of York. With a growing list of nearly 20,000 patients, we continue to develop our service and our wide and varied team. We currently have 14 GPs who work closely with a strong team of dedicated allied health professionals, including Paramedics, Physiotherapists, Advanced Nurse Practitioners, Practice & Treatment Room Nurses and Pharmacists. All are supported by a team of well-trained and committed administrators. We try to be as paper-light as possible and use SystemOne as our clinical system.

Job responsibilities:

• Responsible for providing the 'Best' Customer Service to patients and clinicians and to ensure the effective running of the service.
• See (where appropriate) patients in multimorbidity clinics and in partnership with primary healthcare colleagues and implement improvements to patients' medicines, including deprescribing.
• Will be responsible for actively prescribing within a defined area and for a defined group of Service-users.
• Manage own caseload and run 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).
• 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).
• Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy and implement own prescribing changes (as an independent prescriber) and order relevant monitoring tests.
• Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
• Manage own caseload of vulnerable housebound patients at risk of hospital admission and harm from poor use of medicines.
• Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences, identifying key areas of need for vulnerable patients and formulating care plans.
• Managing caseload for patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence.
• Provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines in the practice.
• Provide a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines.
• Provide out of hours/ on call/extended services for the practice and the patients.
• Use practice searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an unplanned admission and readmissions from medicines.
• Work with case managers, multidisciplinary (health and social care) review teams, hospital colleagues and virtual ward teams to manage medicines-related risk for readmission and patient harm.
• Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
• To reconcile medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes, including identifying and rectifying unexplained changes manage these changes without referral to a GP.
• Perform a clinical medication review, produce a post discharge medicines care plan including dose titration and booking of follow up tests.
• 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).
• Ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional; for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate period of time.
• Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates.
• Working with patients and the primary care team to minimise risks through medicines optimisation.
• Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision-making.
• Conduct clinical audits and improve projects or work with colleagues such as GP registrars, practice managers etc.
• Identify national and local policy and guidance that affects patient safety through the use of medicines, including MHRA alerts, product withdrawals and emerging evidence from clinical trials.
• Support the practice and undertake risk assessment and management and ensure compliance with medicines legislation.
• Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economy's RAG list for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors (red drugs) or subject to shared care (amber drugs).
• Liaise directly with hospital colleagues where prescribing needs to be returned to specialists.
• Assist practices in setting and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on the practice's computer system.
• Provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

General information:

The practice has robust health and safety policies, which you should ensure you are aware of. Staff are reminded of their responsibility to take care of their own personal safety and others whilst at work. In addition, no person shall interfere with, or misuse anything provided in the interests of health, safety, and welfare. Any employee who does so will be liable to serious disciplinary action including dismissal. All employees of MyHealth are reminded of the need to treat all information, particularly clinical and management information, as confidential. Failure to respect this requirement may lead to disciplinary action. This Job Description will be reviewed each year as part of the annual appraisal process, to ensure that it reflects the responsibilities of the post. No changes will be made without full consultation with the post holder.

Person Specification:

• Knowledge: Special interest in respiratory care.
• Qualifications: Independent Prescriber Qualification - Recognised by the GPhC.
• Experience: Working within 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.