Senior Pharmacy Assistant in Wigan

The Pharmacy Department at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are seeking to appoint motivated and dynamic senior pharmacy assistants. Are you ambitious and looking for an exciting new challenge? Do you want to be an integral part of an acute Trust that embraces transformation and is passionate about delivering safe and effective care? If your answers are yes, we have the perfect opportunity for you to join our award‑winning pharmacy team.

Directly accountable to a Lead Pharmacy Technician, you will help the team shape services and standards, driving improvements in medicines optimisation. You will have a good background as a pharmacy assistant and will use your skills already acquired to deliver high quality care to our patients. You will need to be motivated, with excellent communication skills and the ability to work under pressure, to provide excellent patient care and to deliver the Trust’s Medicines Optimisation strategy.

Please note this vacancy may close before the advertised closing date if a sufficient number of suitable applications are received.

Main duties of the job

As part of the multidisciplinary team you will improve key performance indicators such as time to discharge and length of stay and support medicines administration. The pharmacy department is fully modernised and we have an integrated electronic health record / electronic prescribing system. All assistants are expected to work very closely with a well‑established team of pharmacists and technicians to ensure our services are safe, effective and caring. This approach has been shown to reduce length of stay, get patients home earlier in the day, reduce readmission rates, reduce drug expenditure, and improve patient and staff experience.

What do you need to know about the ward pharmacy service?

You will spend your working week on your ward or in the dispensary. You will actively participate in the multi‑disciplinary team supporting medicines administration and processes related to admission and safe discharge.

Working for our organisation

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is proud to provide high‑quality acute hospital and community services to the people of the Wigan Borough and surrounding areas. At WWL, our staff are central to everything we do – we believe that happy staff make for happy patients, and this ethos underpins our culture and our success. We have a strong, recognised track record in staff engagement and in living our values: People at the Heart, Listen and Involve, Kind and Respectful, ONE Team. We are committed to placing patients at the heart of every decision and delivering safe, effective care that protects dignity and enhances experience. We seek to recruit people who share our values, our passion for high‑quality care, and our belief in working together as One Team. At WWL, we recognise the strength that comes from a rich and diverse workforce. We welcome applications from all sections of society and are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

• To receive, interpret, dispense and hand out prescriptions in line with departmental standard operating procedures.
• To undertake patient counselling in the pharmacy/wards under the supervision of a pharmacist or more senior pharmacy technician and in accordance with pharmacy procedures.
• To supply medication to wards, departments and other agencies.
• To recycle or destroy medicines returned from wards, departments and external agencies.
• To order, issue and receive medication and maintain pharmacy stock control system.
• To check expiry dates and safe storage of medicines within areas of responsibility ensuring effective action is taken when necessary.
• To participate in clinical trials under direct supervision ensuring relevant details are maintained in trials documentation.
• To assist in audit and surveys as directed by line manager.
• To support medicines administration at ward level.

Planning and Organisational Duties

• To have understanding of and implement relevant departmental procedures.
• To suggest improvements to departmental procedures through line management where appropriate.

Communications and Key Working Relationships

• To communicate in a professional manner, factual information about availability of medicines to other Trust staff, external departments and patients.
• To participate in the induction training of student technicians, pre‑registration pharmacists and other relevant members of the pharmacy team.
• To train and supervise the work of pharmacy assistants.

Person specification

• Knowledge: Basic computer skills.
• Skills: Ability to work in a team or on own, methodical, accurate.
• Experience: Previous work experience in a pharmacy.
• Qualifications: NVQ level 2 pharmacy services.
• Additional: May be required to lift heavy objects from time to time. Speak English to an appropriate standard relevant to their role, i.e. with confidence and accuracy, using correct sentence structures and vocabulary, and without hesitation.

On-Call

Please note that some roles may require participation in an on‑call rota, particularly those that are operational in nature. The Trust reserves the right to close adverts earlier than the stated closing date if there is a high volume of applications. This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service.