General Practice Clinical Pharmacist in Stanmore

We are looking for an enthusiastic clinical pharmacist, preferably with an independent prescribing qualification, to join our friendly practice, including our excellent team of 6 clinical pharmacists and extensive practice multidisciplinary team. We are an innovative and forward-looking practice of almost 19000 patients, working in modern and well-equipped premises. We believe in retaining the traditional values of general practice, including a strong patient-centred ethos, while embracing innovation and technology to provide a general practice fit for the future.

We embrace skill-mix with an extensive team, including GPs, pharmacists, advanced nurse practitioners, practice nurses, first contact physiotherapists, mental health practitioners, physician associates, paramedics, social prescribing link workers and health care assistants. We are a training practice (GP registrars and medical students) and provide weekly teaching and real-time supervision and mentoring to our pharmacists and nurses and other healthcare professionals. We support the professional development of our team and have extensively developed and expanded the role of our clinical pharmacists through our training and supervision initiatives.

The post holder will work alongside other clinicians in a patient-facing role. They will be able to work independently, though we also provide clinical supervision and debriefs and regular weekly clinical teaching. The post holder will provide primary support to practice staff with regards to prescription and medication queries. They will manage 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 for patients and the practice.

They will take responsibility for areas of chronic disease management, share with other pharmacists in managing the practices repeat prescribing process and undertake clinical medication reviews to proactively manage patients including those with complex polypharmacy. They will provide clinical leadership on medicines optimisation, quality improvement and be responsible for supporting the practice in implementing effective medicine management, including doing searches and audits, identifying areas for improvement, initiating and managing change.

They will maintain a good knowledge of QOF, enhanced services and other parts of the GP Contract, CQC clinical regulatory standards, IIF and other areas. The postholder will be required to both work as part of the practice multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role, but also provide individual clinical decision making around their own caseload of patients.

Job Responsibilities:

• Work as part of the pharmacist team to lead the repeat prescribing system and medication review policy.
• Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and addressing those needing a review.
• Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.
• Answer relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.
• Conduct telephone, face-to-face, virtual and domiciliary (where appropriate) clinical medication reviews to proactively manage patients including those with complex polypharmacy.
• Review the ongoing need for each medication, ensuring monitoring needs are performed and an opportunity to support patients achieve better health outcomes.
• Reduce inappropriate poly-pharmacy and wasteful prescribing and make appropriate recommendations.
• Ensure drug monitoring robust systems are in place for drug monitoring at each practice, streamlining these where possible.
• Develop and implement ways to improve monitoring of high-risk medication such as anticoagulants, anticonvulsants, and DMARDs.
• Monitor practice prescribing against local guidelines and formulary recommendations.
• Provide telephone support for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.
• Provide patient facing and/or virtual appointments or clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice.
• Manage patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence.
• Review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions through audit and individual patient reviews.
• To reconcile medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes.
• Ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate period of time.
• Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.
• Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the practice team.
• Monitor practice prescribing against ICB formulary and medicines optimisation recommendations as appropriate and make recommendations to GPs for appropriate prescribing.
• Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for senior clinical pharmacist, nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.
• Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.
• Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.
• Work with the general practice team to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
• Support public health campaigns and provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

Qualifications:

• Essential: Masters Degree in Pharmacy (MPharm), Registered member of the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) with no restrictions to practice.
• Desirable: Independent prescribing qualification.

Experience:

• Essential: Postgraduate experience in community or hospital pharmacy or general practice, experience in long term condition management, experience in medicines management systems.
• Desirable: Experience of working in a GP practice or PCN, experience in consulting independently.

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. Applicants must have current UK professional registration.