Practice Clinical Pharmacist in Runcorn

This is an exciting opportunity to develop your career as a Clinical Practice Pharmacist within General Practice. This is a permanent ARRS funded role, working solely for Weaver Vale Practice. You will be working to improve value and outcomes from medicines and consult with and treat patients directly, pro-actively managing patients with chronic disease and complex poly-pharmacy.

The successful candidate is likely to have two years postgraduate experience and ideally primary care prescribing experience, although we would support an exceptional candidate to gain their prescribing qualifications. You will have completed or will be willing to complete the Primary Care Pharmacy Education Pathway. You will work alongside an established PCN pharmacy team under which take specific workstreams in the practice, and our other practice pharmacist. We also work closely with the ICB medicines management pharmacist team. We will provide GP partner supervision with opportunities to grow and develop professionally. Salary negotiable depending on experience and skill set. This is between 30 and 37.5 hrs post to be worked over five days.

Main duties of the job:

• Patient facing roles, managing medication related problems and queries, structured medication reviews, hypertension management and optimisation of medications, working closely with GPs to support medication reviews for frail elderly and those with complex polypharmacy, management of long-term conditions.
• Staff facing roles, providing support to general practice staff in relation to repeat prescriptions and medication queries.
• Quality, governance and improvement - working with the prescribing and wider practice team on safety and medicines optimisation. Support the practice medicines lead on local QIP and audit. Support the development of robust systems for medication reviews, monitoring, and follow-up.

About us: We are a supportive, friendly and caring practice, and value the importance of being inspired and enthused by our work. We are open to new ideas and ways of working. Your opinions and well-being matter. We ensure a healthy work-life balance is maintained through the decisions we make, and we continually review our working structure to enable this.

Job responsibilities:

• Work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role.
• Support, promote and implement high quality, evidence-based, cost-effective and safe use of medicines.
• Conduct structured medication reviews to proactively manage patients with complex polypharmacy.
• Provide clinical medicines expertise to both patients and general practice teams.
• Improve service and quality through mechanisms such as audits.
• Interface with community and hospital colleagues to help resolve medication-related issues.
• Assist with delivery of enhanced health in our care home.

Person Specification Duties:

• Perform medication reviews of patients with polypharmacy, in practice and in patients homes (including care homes).
• Through structured medication reviews, support patients to take their medications to get the best from them, reduce waste and promote self-care.
• Provide expertise in clinical medicines review and address public health and social needs of patients in GP practices.
• Discuss complex and sensitive information with patients during medication review including medical histories, lifestyles and personal circumstances and to refer on to other services as appropriate.
• Improve patient and carer understanding of, confidence in and compliance with their medicines.
• Provide leadership on person-centred medicines optimisation and quality improvement whilst contributing to the quality and outcomes framework and enhanced services.
• Provide general practitioners with appropriate recommendations and actions plans following medication review clinics with patients to optimise the patients treatment with medicines and ensure appropriate follow up with patients.
• Record medication review plans, recommendations and outcomes on GP computer clinical systems and own clinical notes in accordance with practice procedures.
• Reconcile medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes; identify and rectify unexplained changes; manage changes by referral to the GP; perform clinical medication review; support the production of post-discharge medicines care plans and work with patients and community pharmacists to ensure patients receive the medicines they need.
• Support the processing of complex repeat prescribing medication requests made by patients or other repeat prescribing queries.
• Liaise with the GP and Nurse team on prescribing and medication issues, especially around management of long-term conditions.
• Develop as an independent prescriber to manage and prescribe for patients within a specific chronic disease area.
• With appropriate training, monitor the effects of medication by checking clinical signs (e.g. BP, pulse monitoring, etc).
• Attend regular clinical supervision sessions to promote a culture of continuous professional development and shared learning.

Supportive Clinical Duties:

• As part of the multi-disciplinary team, attend relevant MDT meetings, providing information and feedback.
• Report medicines related incidents, contribute to investigations and root cause analyses as well as participating in serious incident investigations and multidisciplinary case reviews.
• Mentor and guidance to other clinicians and staff on medicine issues.
• Attend Protected Learning Time sessions (PLTs) and possibly practice away days/development sessions.
• Critically appraise clinical evidence and present information to prescribers via prescribing meetings and educational events, as required.
• Lead on medicines management governance arrangements to adhere to CQC standards, including assisting in developing policies and SOPs.
• Review repeat prescribing protocols and processes and support staff in their implementation.
• Perform prescribing audits and direct/supervise the audit activity of others.
• Be responsible for delivering local prescribing quality initiatives in collaboration with ICB medicine management.
• Develop an effective network and working relationship with individual practice GPs, practice staff, ICB medicines management colleagues, secondary care and other professionals.

All members of staff have an individual responsibility to comply with the organisations policies and practices.

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.