ARRS Clinical Pharmacist for Carshalton PCN in Sutton Coldfield

Our Sutton PCNs are forward-looking, friendly and focused on providing a wide range of excellent healthcare services to patients in Sutton and the surrounding area. Our PCNs are led by PCN Clinical Directors. The PCNs see the benefits of working together as a larger GP partnership and are delighted to be realising some of those benefits now. Because of our scale, we are more resilient and efficient, allowing us to invest in continuous quality improvement, enhanced care, new services, and training and developing our workforce. We value the diversity of our colleagues and actively champion an inclusive culture, committed to helping our colleagues achieve a work/life balance.

Sutton PCN is seeking an innovative, inspirational and committed Primary Care Networks Governance Lead to strategically oversee its stages of development and performance. You will be joining a great team in a great place, where your commitment will be genuinely valued, your skills respected, and your ambition rewarded.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will be responsible for supporting the Sutton Primary Care Networks to provide expert medicine management and optimisation, vaccinating and drawing up vaccines, whilst working within their area of clinical competence and as part of a multi-disciplinary team. They will be supported by a Senior Clinical Pharmacist and others who will develop, manage and mentor them. The role will be patient-facing and pharmacists will be involved in structured medication reviews, including poly-pharmacy reviews, managing chronic long-term conditions and managing medications after transfer of care. They will also have access to appropriate clinical supervision.

The post holder will provide support and deliver patient services as determined by the Network Policy as well as local and national guidance. They will also provide leadership on quality improvement and clinical audit, manage some aspects of the Quality and Outcomes Framework and maximise cost-effective prescribing to improve the quality of patient care.

The post holder will be enrolled on to the 18-month Primary care pharmacy education pathway with the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE). They will also be supported to develop their role to become a non-medical prescriber, if that qualification is not already held.

About us

Sutton has a population of approximately 200,000 residents registered to 22 practices and there are currently 4 Primary Care Networks (PCNs); Carshalton, Cheam & South Sutton, Central Sutton and Wallington PCN; each serving a population of approximately 50,000 patients. PCNs form a key building block of the NHS long-term plan. Bringing general practices together to work at scale has been a policy priority for some years for a range of reasons, including improving the ability of practices to recruit and retain staff; to manage financial and estates pressures; to provide a wider range of services to patients and to more easily integrate with the wider health and care system.

Job responsibilities

• Clinical Responsibilities
• Long-term condition clinics: Undertake reviews for patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required or an annual review is due (e.g. Respiratory, Cardiovascular or Diabetes).
• Review and advise on the need to continue each medication, review any monitoring requirements and support the patient to ensure they are getting the best use out of their medications.
• Manage own caseload of patients, running own long-term condition clinics where appropriate.
• See patients in multimorbidity clinics and in partnership with primary healthcare colleagues and implement improvements to patients' medicines, including de-prescribing.
• Manage own caseload, run own 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 hypertension, asthma, diabetes and COPD) and where trained to do so.
• Review the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking.
• Clinical Medication Review
• Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients (either patient facing or over the telephone).
• Reduce inappropriate poly-pharmacy and wasteful prescribing.
• Make appropriate recommendations on prescribing and monitoring of medications.
• Management of medicines post hospital discharge
• Reconcile medications following hospital discharge and outpatient clinics.
• Identify any discrepancies and unexplained medication changes and work with the patients and community pharmacists to ensure patients receive the medications they need post-discharge.
• Ensure continuity of medicines supply to high-risk groups of patients is maintained (e.g. those with compliance aids or those in care homes).
• Risk stratification
• Use pre-prepared Emis searches to identify cohorts of patients who are on high risk medications (e.g. immunosuppressants, anticonvulsants etc).
• Recall patients who are overdue their routine monitoring tests and inform them to have these tests done as soon as possible.
• 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 the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
• Implement drug withdrawals and alerts.
• Liaise with the GP surgeries to implement MHRA drug withdrawals and medication alerts to improve medicines safety.
• Implement local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations.
• Monitor practice prescribing against local, national and formulary guidelines and make recommendations to GPs for medicines that should be prescribed only by the hospital or subject to shared care agreements.
• Work with GPs and patients to implement NICE and other evidence-based guidelines to improve the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of prescribing.
• Medicine information to practice staff and patients
• Answer relevant medicine-related queries from GPs, other network staff, healthcare teams (e.g. Community pharmacy) and patients.
• Suggest and recommend solutions and/or possible alternatives e.g. around out of stock medications.
• Signposting
• Ensure patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional if you are not the correct person to deal with their query/condition.
• Medicines quality improvement
• Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the relevant practice team.
• Education and Training
• Provide education and training to the broader primary healthcare team on medicines optimisation.
• Care Quality Commission
• Work with the general practice teams to ensure the practices are 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.

Person Specification

• Qualifications: Professional knowledge acquired through vocational masters degree in pharmacy degree, Postgraduate diploma (or working towards) or equivalent evidence of clinical knowledge, competence and achievements in practice. Registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC). Evidence of commitment to and able to demonstrate CPD including Management qualification/professional development. Independent Pharmacist Prescriber accreditation or willing to work towards. Proven post-graduate experience as a clinical pharmacist. Membership with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Training in safeguarding vulnerable adults and children.
• Experience: Minimum 2 years post-qualification experience in a hospital, community or general practice setting. Knowledge of the breadth of common acute and long-term conditions that are likely to be seen in general practice. Experience of collaborative working and of building relationships across a variety of organisations. Able to undertake medication or medicine use reviews, and offer patient counselling. Experience of facilitating change to improve clinical practice. Experience in undertaking clinical audit. Working knowledge of IT NHS. Experience of IT applications in primary care including Emis.

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.

Depending on experience aligned with NHS Band 7.