Clinical Pharmacist in Sunderland

Hours: West Locality 2 x Full-time (37.5 hours per week) & North Locality 1 x Part Time (28 hours per week)

Main duties of the job:

• Working within your professional and clinical boundaries as part of an established multi-disciplinary team to provide expertise in all areas of medicine related practice in a patient facing role.
• Working in partnership with various organisations, to improve the quality and safety of care offered to our patients.
• Using independent prescribing to support better access to medicines, clinical medicines management, provide face to face structured medication reviews, tackling polypharmacy and manage long term conditions.
• To manage medicines on transfer of care and systems for safer prescribing including manage repeat prescriptions, acute prescription requests and antibiotic stewardship, while addressing both the public health and social care needs of patients across the primary care network practices.
• To ensure that PCN practices integrate with community and hospital pharmacy to help utilise skill mix, improve patient outcomes, ensure better access to healthcare and help manage workload.
• This role is pivotal to improving the care and operational efficiencies so requires motivation and passion to deliver an excellent service within general practice.

About us:

Sunderland GP Alliance began in 2015 and as a limited company we have grown to over 200 employees today. We are innovative in responding to the changing needs of a 21st century health care system. With a not-for-profit ethos people are at the heart of everything we do. Whether it is a patient being seen at one of our GP practices or out of hours service, or the people at the heart of the Alliance who make it a great friendly place to work. We want people to realise their potential inside and outside of work which is why we support your development and offer 33 days holiday plus bank holidays.

Job responsibilities:

• The focus of the post holders work will depend on the qualifications, skills and experience of the individual and the needs of the PCN Practice(s) both of which may develop over time.
• Patient facing long term condition clinics: See patients in multimorbidity clinics and in partnership with primary healthcare colleagues and implement improvements to patients medicines, including de-prescribing, managing own case load.
• Patient facing clinical medication review and support: Undertake structured, clinical shared decision making medication reviews with patients and utilising your independent prescribing and order relevant monitoring with appropriate review.
• Telephone medicines support: Provide a telephone support for patients with queries and concerns about their medicines.
• Patient facing care home/residential clinical medication reviews: Manage own caseload of care home residents providing a structured medication review.
• Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
• Patient facing domiciliary/home visits: Manage own caseload of vulnerable housebound patients at risk of hospital admission and harm from poor use of their medicines.
• Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences. Identifying key areas of need for vulnerable patients and formulating care plans.
• Management of common/minor/self-limiting ailments: Manage own caseload for patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence, signposting as appropriate.
• Triage/differentiated/undifferentiated diagnosis: Ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate clinician for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate period of time.
• Medicine information to practice staff and patients: Answer all medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.
• Unplanned hospital admissions: Implement practice searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an unplanned admission/re-admission from medicines.
• Work with colleagues to manage medicines-related risk for readmission and patient harm. Put in place changes to optimise prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
• Management of medicines at discharge from hospital: Reconcile medicines following hospital discharge and upon admission to care homes, including identifying and rectifying unexplained changes manage these changes independently.
• Work with hospital and community colleagues to proactively manage patients at high risk of medicine related problems before they are discharged to ensure continuity of care.
• Repeat prescribing: Produce if necessary and implement a practice repeat prescribing policy, ensuring promoting cost effective use of medicines and minimising unnecessary waste. Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process.
• Medicines Optimisation and Quality Improvement programmes: Support the delivery of local and national quality or cost effectiveness initiatives, identifying areas of prescribing for review.
• Incorporate the objectives of medicines optimisation into everyday general practice.
• Conduct clinical audits and quality improvement projects, presenting results and providing leadership on suggested changes.
• Support new services that are built around new medicines, or medicines within NICE guidance or a local care pathway. Contribute to the achievement of KPIs and PCN objectives.
• Information management: Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision-making.
• Medicines safety and Risk Stratification: Identify cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines following national and local drug safety alerts e.g. MHRA.
• Responsibility for management of risk stratification tools on behalf of the practice. Working with patients and the primary care team to minimise risks through medicines optimisation.
• Manage the process of implementing changes to medicines and guidance for practitioners.
• Provide leadership for antibiotic stewardship.
• Care Quality Commission: Support the general practice team to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
• Undertake risk assessment and ensure the management of medicines in the Practice complies with medicines legislation.
• Shared Care and Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations: 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.
• Public health: Support public health campaigns.
• Communication and collaborative working: The post-holder should recognise the importance of effective communication.
• It is vital the post holder works collaboratively with their PCN clinical director; Recognises the roles of other colleagues within the network and their role to patient care.
• Demonstrates use of appropriate communication to gain the co-operation of relevant stakeholders (including patients, senior and peer colleagues, and other professionals, other NHS/private organisations e.g. CCGs).
• Is able to recognise personal limitations and refer to more appropriate colleague(s) when necessary.
• Training & Development: Fully participates in training and development. Engages in a programme of ongoing support and feedback to maximise the benefit of the training and development plan.
• Confidentiality: In the course of seeking treatment, patients entrust us with, or allow us to gather, sensitive information in relation to their health. They do so in confidence and have the right to expect that staff will respect their privacy and act appropriately.
• Information relating to patients, carers, colleagues, other healthcare workers or the business of the Practice may only be divulged to authorised persons in accordance with the practice or Alliance policies and procedures relating to confidentiality, and the protection of personal and sensitive data.
• Health & Safety: The post-holder will assist in promoting and maintaining their own and others health, safety and security as defined in the Practice Health & Safety Policy to include: Identifying the risk involved in work activities and undertaking such activities in a way that manages those risks.
• Ensuring that all accidents or dangerous accidents are reported and investigated, and follow up action taken where necessary.
• Equality and Diversity: The post-holder will support the quality, diversity and rights of patients, carers and colleagues to include: Acting in a way that recognizes the importance of peoples rights, interpreting them in a way that is consistent with current legislation.
• Respecting the privacy, dignity, needs and beliefs of patients, carers and colleagues.
• Behaving in a manner which is welcoming to and of the individual, is non-judgemental and respects their circumstances, feelings, priorities and rights.
• Quality: The post-holder will strive to maintain quality within the Practice, and will: Alert the other team members to issues of quality and risk.
• Assess own performance and take accountability for own actions, either directly or under supervision.
• Contribute to the effectiveness of the team by reflecting on own and team activities and making suggestions on ways to improve and enhance the teams performance.
• Work effectively with individuals in other agencies to meet patients needs.
• Effectively manage own time, workload and resources.
• Communication: The post-holder should recognise the importance of effective communication within the team and will strive to: Communicate effectively with other team members.
• Communicate effectively with patients and carers.
• Recognise peoples needs for alternative methods of communication and respond accordingly.

Person Specification:

• Qualifications: Mandatory registration with General Pharmaceutical Council.
• Minimum of two years post qualification experience.
• Independent prescriber.
• Evidence of continuing professional development.
• The post holder must either have completed the CPPE primary care pathway or be working towards it.
• UK driving licence.
• UK work permit (if required).
• Clinical diploma or other post graduate qualification.

• Experience: Minimum of two years post-qualification experience.
• Appreciation of General Practice and working alongside General practice staff.
• An appreciation of the nature of primary care prescribing, concepts of rational prescribing and strategies for improving prescribing.
• In depth therapeutic and clinical knowledge and understanding of the principles of evidence based healthcare including clinical audit.

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.