Job responsibilities
Provide a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines and acute medication requests.
Management Of Medicines At Discharge From Hospital
To 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).Management Of Medicines Reconciliation of Clinic Letters
Patient Facing Long-Term Conditions Clinics
See patients face to face, or work with patients on the telephone, or by written correspondence (where appropriate with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required (e.g. COPD, asthma).
Review the on-going need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. 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 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.
Patient Facing Medicines Support
Provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice
Medicine Information To Practice Staff And Patients
Answers relevant medicine -related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.
Suggesting and recommending solutions.
Providing 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 the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
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
Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation 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.
This might include risks that are patient related, medicine related, or both.
Service Development
Contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have 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 the results and implement changes in conjunction with the practice team.
Administration of Vaccinations
Undertake training annually to ensure that the practice can compile with vaccination programmes and Travel Vaccination
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 economys 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 seeing and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on the practices computer system.
Auditing practices compliance 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.
Public Health
To support public health campaigns.
To provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.
Collaborative Working Relationships
Recognises the roles of other colleagues within the organisation 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. ICBs)
Is able to recognise personal limitations and refer to more appropriate colleague(s) when necessary
Actively work toward developing and maintaining effective working relationships both within and outside the practice and locality
Foster and maintain strong links with all services across locality
Explores the potential for collaborative working and takes opportunities to initiate and sustain such relationships
Demonstrates ability to integrate general practice with community and hospital pharmacy teams
Liaises with ICB colleagues including ICB Pharmacists on prescribing related matters to ensure consistency of patient care and benefit
Liaises with ICB pharmacists and Heads of Medicines Management/ Optimisation to benefit from peer support
Liaises with other stakeholders as needed for the collective benefit of patients including but not limited to:
o Patients
o GP, nurses and other practice staff
o Other healthcare professionals including ICB pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, optometrists, dentists, health and social care teams and dieticians etc.
o Community nurses and other allied health professionals
o Community and hospital pharmacy teams
o Hospital staff with responsibilities for prescribing and medicines optimisation
o Patient Reference Group
Confidentiality
In the course of seeking treatment, patients entrust us with, or allow us to gather, sensitive information in relation to their health and other matters. They do so in confidence and have the right to expect that staff will respect their privacy and act appropriately. In the performance of the duties outlined in this job description, the post-holder will have access to confidential information relating to the Practice as a business organisation. All such information from any source is to be regarded as strictly confidential. 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 Policies and Procedures relating to confidentiality and the protection of personal and sensitive data.