PCN Clinical Pharmacist

Job description

Job responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

· Patient facing long term condition clinics: see (where appropriate) patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required. Review the ongoing need for each medicine, review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking, ensuring they get the best use of their medicines, making appropriate recommendations to GPs for medicine improvement.

· Patient facing clinical medication review: undertake reviews with patients and produce recommendations for nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring

· Patient facing care home medication reviews: undertake reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the nurses and/or GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.

· Patient facing domiciliary clinical medication reviews: undertake reviews with patients and produce recommendations for nurses and/or GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.

· Risk stratification: identify cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through practice computer searches. This might include risks that are patient related, medicine related, or both.

· 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 such medicines to high risk patient groups.

· Management of common/minor/self-limiting ailments: manage a caseload of patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working with a scope of practise and limits of competence. Signpost to community pharmacy and refer to GPs or other healthcare professionals as appropriate

· Patient facing medicines support: provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.

· Telephone medicines support: provide a telephone helpline for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines

· Management of medicines at discharge: 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. Establish and manage systems to ensure continuity of medicines supply to high risk groups (eg, those with medicines compliance aids or those in care homes).

· Medicine information to practice staff and patients: respond to relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other PCN staff, other healthcare teams (eg community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines, suggesting and recommending solutions. Provide follow up for patients to monitor the effect of any changes.

· Signposting: ensure that patients are referred to the appropriate healthcare professional for the appropriate level of care within an appropriate period of time (eg, pathology results, common/minor ailments, acute conditions, long term condition reviews, etc).

· Repeat prescribing: produce and implement a repeat prescribing policy within each PCN practice. Manage the repeat prescribing and authorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and flagging up those requiring a review. Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.

· Service development: contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have medicinal components (eg, 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 relevant practice team.

· 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 economy’s 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 each practices’ computer system, auditing practices’ compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance and 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 teams to ensure the practices are compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.

· Public health: support public health campaigns, to provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

· Collaborative working arrangements:

o Participates in the PCN MDT

o Liaise with CCG colleagues, including pharmacists, on prescribing related matters to ensure consistency of patient care and benefit

o Liaise with colleagues including CCG/ICS pharmacists and pharmacy technicians on prescribing related matters to ensure consistency of patient care and benefit

o Liaise with colleagues including CCG/ICS pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and heads of medicines management/optimisation to benefit from peer support

o Foster and maintain strong links with all services across the PCN and neighbouring PCNs

o Explore the potential for collaborative working and takes opportunities to initiate and sustain such relationships

o Liaise with other stakeholders as needed for the collective benefit of patients

Professional Development

· Work with your line manager to undertake continual personal and professional development, taking an active part in reviewing and developing the role and responsibilities.

· Adhere to organsational policies and procedures, including confidentiality, safeguarding, lone working, information governance and health and safety

· Work with your line manager to access regular clinical supervision, to enable you to deal effectively with the difficult issues that people present

· Review annual progress and develop clear plans to achieve results within priorities set by others

· Participate in the delivery of formal education programmes

· Demonstrate an understanding of current educational policies relevant to working areas of practise and keep up to date with relevant clinical practise

Research and evaluation

· Critically evaluate and review literature

· Identify where there is a gap in the evidence base to support practise

· Generate evidence suitable for presentations at practice and local level

· Apply research evidence base into the workplace

Health and safety/risk management

· Must comply at all times with Health and Safety policies, in particular following safe working procedures and reporting incidents using the organisation’s incident reporting systems

· Comply with the Data Protection Act (2018) and the Access to Health Records Act (1990)

Special working conditions

· The post holder is required to travel independently between work sites and to attend meetings, etc, hosted by other agencies

· The post holder will have contact with body fluids, ie, wound exudates, urine, etc, while in clinical practise

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• Mandatory registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council
• Completion of an undergraduate degree in pharmacy and registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council

Desirable

• Membership Primary Care Pharmacy Association
• Membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society
• Hold or be working towards an independent prescribing qualification
• Clinical Diploma
• Non-medical prescriber

Experience

Essential

• Minimum of 2 years post qualifying experience
• Understanding of the wider determinants of health, including social, economic and environmental factors and their impact on communities
• An appreciation of the nature of primary care prescribing, concepts of rational prescribing and strategies for improving prescribing
• Knowledge of IT systems, including the ability to use word processing skills, emails and the internet to create simple plans and reports
• Able to obtain and analyse complex technical information
• Able to gain acceptance for recommendations and influence, motivate and persuade the audience to comply with the recommendations or agreed course of action where there may be significant barriers

Desirable

• In depth therapeutic and clinical knowledge and understanding of the principles of evidence-based healthcare
• Able to plan, manage, monitor and review general medicine optimisation issues in core areas for long term conditions

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.

UK Registration

Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).

Employer details

Employer name

Imp Federation Ltd

Address

Commerce House

Carlton Boulevard

Lincoln

LN2 4HY

Employer's website

http://imphealthcare.co.uk/ (Opens in a new tab)