Primary Care Network Clinical Pharmacist in London

Acton Primary Care Network (PCN) is seeking an experienced Clinical Pharmacist to join our team to work across our network practices in a dynamic role. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in delivering a high-quality medicines optimisation and management service to patients with chronic diseases. Additionally, they will work towards meeting various local and national enhanced service delivery specifications, aiming to improve patient care.

As a Clinical Pharmacist, you will be ensuring that our network practices have robust governance systems and processes in place to manage patient care effectively. Your focus will be on safe prescribing, monitoring of higher risk drugs, management of long-term conditions, and early detection of potential missed diagnoses, aligning with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) standards.

Acton PCN comprises 13 GP practices, serving a population of 80,000 patients. We pride ourselves on our well-established and collaborative inter-practice relationships, with a shared goal of improving the health and outcomes of our patients within the local community.

We are seeking a motivated and passionate individual who is dedicated to delivering excellent service within the general practice setting. If you are enthusiastic about making a positive impact on patient care and thrive in a dynamic healthcare environment, we encourage you to apply.

Main duties of the job

• The successful candidate will have responsibilities that include overseeing the repeat prescribing process within the network practices, which may complement the existing clinical pharmacists in their roles.
• You will have a designated cohort of patients who may have medication queries or require medication reviews, and you will take the lead in designing and delivering a service specifically tailored to their needs.
• Additionally, you will be responsible for conducting review clinics for patients with chronic diseases such as Asthma, COPD, Pre-Diabetes, Diabetes, Hypertension, and Heart Failure. These clinics may be conducted face-to-face, through telephone consultations, or via video calls.
• Ensuring safe prescribing practices, monitoring higher risk drugs, managing long-term conditions, and identifying potential missed diagnoses in accordance with CQC standards.
• As the post holder, you will be expected to lead in implementing and managing MHRA and drug safety alerts and updates.
• Using appropriate searches, you will identify patient cohorts within the network to ensure safe practices and promptly communicate necessary updates or changes to the practice teams.

About us

Ealing GP Federation is a prominent membership organisation that represents 72 general practices within the London Borough of Ealing. Our mission is to provide comprehensive support and guidance to our member practices, enabling them to deliver high-quality care to their patients.

As an organisation, we value the well-being and work-life balance of our employees. We offer a generous annual leave entitlement of 25 days, and we provide flexibility for leave to be carried over when necessary. We understand the importance of continuous learning and personal development, which is why we also offer up to 5 days of study leave to support our staff in pursuing further education or professional qualifications.

At Ealing GP Federation and Acton PCN, we are committed to nurturing the professional growth and well-being of our employees. We provide a supportive infrastructure, access to training opportunities, and a culture that promotes teamwork and mutual support.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• Design, develop and implement computer searches to identify cohorts of patients with chronic disease who need review and medicines optimisation.
• Manage own case load. Do the necessary checks for QOF and Ealing Standard entering the data correctly on the computer system.
• Where patients have more than one condition; reviewing co-morbidities in the same appointment and updating QOF and Ealing Standard as appropriate.
• Undertake structured medication reviews with patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy and implement own prescribing changes (as an independent prescriber) and order relevant monitoring tests.
• Request and manage the results for the cohort of patients under your care in a safe and timely way.
• Identify and provide leadership on areas of prescribing requiring improvement. Conduct own audits and improvement projects and work with colleagues.
• Develop and manage new services that are built around new medicines or NICE guidance.
• Provide leadership to the practice manager and GPs to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
• Attend MDT, Network, Practice, ICB and Federation meetings as required.
• To foster and maintain good relationships between, within and outside the Practices involved in the network.
• To devise and manage population and public health campaigns to run within the network if required.
• Answer all medicine related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff and patients with queries about medicines.
• Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.
• Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economies RAG list for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors or subject to shared care.

Person Specification

Essential

• Excellent communication and consultation skills both verbal (face to face and phone) and written.
• Places patients and relatives at the center of all decisions regarding their care.
• Can deliver clinics within appropriate time frames.
• Develops and uses skills to take an appropriate history uses clinical examination skills and recognises common presentations and red flags treating or referring appropriately.
• Demonstrates problem solving skills.
• Expert level understanding of therapeutics and clinical pharmacy.
• Experienced in level 3 review and management of complex multimorbidity, polypharmacy and medicines optimisation.
• Ability to use local clinical IT systems, can access patient data, run searches, understands read codes pathology and other functionality.
• Promotes safe and effective use of electronic prescribing.

Desirable

• Candidates must either hold the CPPE qualification or be actively working towards its completion.
• Minimum of 2 years post graduate experience in pharmacy as demonstrated within a practice portfolio.
• Able to plan, manage, monitor, advise and review general pharmaceutical care programmes for patients across core areas including disease states long term conditions.