PCN Pharmacist

Chiltern Hills PCN are looking for a full time Pharmacist to join our Team.

Responsibilities

• Patient facing Long-term condition Clinics – see (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, review monitoring needs and support patients with their medicines taking to ensure best use of medicines (medicines optimisation). Make appropriate recommendations to GPs for medicine improvement.
• Patient facing Clinical Medication Review – undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for 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 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 nurses and GPs on prescribing and monitoring.
• Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.
• Management of common/minor/self-limiting ailments – manage caseload of patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence. 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 – answer relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines; suggest and recommend solutions. Provide 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 prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.

Job Summary

You will provide clinical leadership on medicines optimisation and quality improvement and manage some aspects of the quality and outcomes framework and enhanced services. You will provide primary support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medication queries and help support the repeat prescription system, deal with acute prescription requests, and medicines reconciliation on transfer of care and systems for safer prescribing, medication audits, Prescribing Incentive Scheme, providing expertise in clinical medicines advice while addressing both public and social care needs of patients.

Clinical Pharmacist – Job Description

• Management of medicines at discharge from hospital – 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 – produce and implement a practice repeat prescribing policy; manage the repeat prescribing reauthorization 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-prepared practice computer searches (may include patient-related, medicine-related, or both).
• Service development – contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services with 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 results and implement changes 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 economy’s 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 maintaining a practice formulary hosted on the practice’s computer system; auditing 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 – support public health campaigns and provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

Personal Specification

Qualifications – Essential: Masters degree in pharmacy (MPharm) (Or equivalent); Specialist knowledge via postgraduate diploma level or equivalent training/experience; Independent prescriber or working towards independent prescribing; Mandatory registration with General Pharmaceutical Council.

Desirable: Member of or working towards Faculty membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Experience – Essential: Minimum 2 years post-qualification experience.

Desirable: Recent General Clinical Pharmacy Activity relevant to Primary Care; Previous experience of providing prescribing advice or support in primary or secondary care; Experience of delivering patient clinics or services.

Skills

• Excellent interpersonal, influencing and negotiating skills;
• Ability to communicate complex information understandably;
• Ability to plan, manage, monitor, advise and review medicine optimisation for long-term conditions;
• Computer literacy with GP systems (desirable) and MS Office (essential);
• Ability to analyse complex information;
• Ability to identify priorities and refer to seniors or GPs when needed;
• Ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines;
• Ability to produce timely reports.

Reporting to Business Manager and Partners