Job responsibilities
Job Summary
The post holder is a pharmacist, who acts within
their professional boundaries, supporting and working alongside a team of
pharmacists in general practice. In this role they will be supported by a
senior clinical pharmacist and the pharmacists at the host site who will
develop, manage and mentor them.
The post holder will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team
in a patient-facing role. The post holder will take responsibility for areas of
chronic disease management within the network, contribute to improving the
health of patients and undertake structured medication reviews to proactively
optimise medication for patients with complex polypharmacy in the community
pharmacy setting.
The post holder will facilitate lines of
communication between the network practices and applicable community pharmacies
to help support the repeat prescription system, deal with medication queries,
and medicines reconciliation on transfer of care and systems for safer
prescribing.
The post holder will provide clinical
leadership on medicines optimisation and quality improvement and manage some
aspects of the quality and outcomes framework and enhanced services.
The post holder will ensure that the
practices integrate with community pharmacies to help utilise skill mix,
improve patient outcomes, ensure better access to healthcare and help manage
workload. The role is pivotal to improving the quality of care and operational
efficiencies so requires motivation and passion to deliver excellent service
within the community pharmacy setting.
The post holder will be supported to
develop their role to become a non- medical prescriber.
Key Duties, Patient Facing:
-Long-term
condition clinics
Where appropriate patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine
optimisation is required (e.g. COPD, asthma and Hypertension).
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 Senior Pharmacists or GPs
for medicine improvement.
- Structured Medication Review
Undertake
structured medication reviews with patients and escalating where necessary for
senior clinical pharmacist, nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.
- Care home medication reviews
Undertake
clinical medication reviews with patients and escalating where necessary for
the senior clinical pharmacist, nurses or GPs on prescribing and monitoring.
Work with
care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering, storage, recording
administration and disposal.
Patient
facing domiciliary clinical medication review
Undertake
clinical medication reviews with patients in their own homes and produce recommendations
for the senior clinical pharmacists, nurses and GPs on prescribing and monitoring.
Delivering
various aspects (not exclusive) of the Network Contract Directed Enhanced
Service (DES) as required by the network. Relevant pages:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/update-to-the-gp-contract-agreement-v2-updated.pdf
- Unplanned hospital admissions
Proactively
search for and 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 highrisk patient groups.
- Management
of medicines at discharge from hospital
To review
and 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 highrisk groups of patients
(e.g. those with medicine compliance aids or those in care homes).
- 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. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.
- Risk stratification
Identification
of cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through
pre-prepared practice computer searches and review where appropriate.
- Service development
This is a
new and unique role and post, the post holder will be supported to develop
and maximise the impact of the service. 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.
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 and inform Network
surgeries about medicine stock shortages in community pharmacies.
- Education and Training
Provide
education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and
medicines optimisation.
- Research and development
The post
holder will engage and collaborate with partners both internal and external
to audit, collect data, evaluate, analyse and publish findings and research
into this role
- Care Quality Commission
Work with
the general practice team to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC
standards where medicines are involved.
- Public health
To support public health campaigns.
To provide knowledge
on all public health programmes available to the general public.
