Job responsibilities
Main Responsibilities
To maintain
registration as a pharmacist and comply with appropriate professional codes
To plan and
organise own workload, including audit, project work, and provide training
sessions for other members of the multi-disciplinary team.
Maintain and
develop professional competence and expertise, keep up to date with
medical/therapeutic evidence and opinion, and local and national service,
legislation and policy developments
To develop and
facilitate good working relationships with community pharmacists and other
stakeholders
Attend local,
regional and national meetings of relevance
Undertake any
other duties commensurate with the post holders grade as agreed with the
locality and/or practice lead GPs
All employees
should understand that it is their personal responsibility to comply with all
organisational and statutory requirements (e.g. health and safety, equal
treatment and diversity, confidentiality and clinical governance).
Key Duties
Management of medicines
after discharge from hospital
To reconcile
medicines following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care
homes; identify and rectify unexplained changes; manage these changes without
referral to the GP; perform a clinical medication review; produce a
post-discharge medicines care plan including dose titration and booking of
follow-up tests. Work 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).
Work in partnership with hospital colleagues (e.g. care of the elderly doctors
and clinical pharmacists) to proactively manage patients at high risk of
medicine-related problems before they are discharged to ensure continuity of
care
Risk stratification
Design, develop and implement
searches to identify cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines.
Work with patients and the primary care team to minimise risks through
medicines optimisation. Implement local and national guidelines and formulary
recommendations. Monitor practice prescribing against the local health
economys Red/Amber/Green/Grey lists for medicines that should be prescribed by
hospital doctors or subject to shared care. Liaise directly with hospital
colleagues where prescribing needs to be returned to specialists. Suggest and
develop computer decision support tools to help remind prescribers about the
agreed formulary choice and local recommendations. Audit practices compliance
with NICE guidance. Proactively provide practice communications on important
prescribing messages to improve prescribers knowledge and work with the team
to develop and implement other techniques known to influence implementation of
evidence.
Unplanned hospital
admissions
Devise and implement practice
searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an
unplanned admission and readmissions from medicines. Work with
multi-professional colleagues to manage medicines-related risk for readmission
and patient harm. Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these
medicines to high-risk patient groups
Repeat prescribing
Review,
update and implement a practice repeat prescribing policy. Manage the repeat
prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat
prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates.
Patient facing medicines
support
Provide a telephone help line
for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines. Hold
clinics for patients requiring face-toface clinical medication reviews (CMRs)
i.e. a review of the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring
needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicine taking.
Identify people at risk of hospital admission and harm from poor use of
medicines. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary team meetings.
Care home medication reviews
Manage caseload of care home
residents (if required by the practice). Undertake clinical medication reviews
with patients with multimorbidity and polypharmacy. Work with care home staff
to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
Long term condition clinics
See patients in
multi-morbidity clinics and in partnership with primary healthcare colleagues
and implement improvements to patients medicines, including de-prescribing.
Service development
Develop and manage new services
that are built around new medicines or NICE guidance, where new
medicine/recommendations allow the development of a new care pathway (e.g. new
oral anticoagulants for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation)
Care Quality Commission (CQC)
Provide
leadership to the practice manager and GPs to ensure the practice is compliant
with CQC standards where medicines are involved
Cost saving programmes
Make recommendations for,
support and supervise practice prescribing clerks. Make changes to medicines
designed to save on medicine costs where a medicine or product with lower
acquisition cost is now available
Medicine information to
practice staff and patients
Answer all medicine related
enquiries from GPs, practice staff and patients. Provide follow ups for
patients to monitor the effect of any changes
Medicines quality
improvement
Identify and provide leadership
on areas of prescribing requiring improvement. Either conduct own audits and
improvement projects or work with colleagues such as GP registrars. Present
results and provide leadership on suggested change. Contribute to national and
local research initiatives
Training & Shared
Learning
Provide
education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines
optimisation. Provide training to visiting medical students. Facilitate shared
learning across the practices on medication related issues, offering
professional support and leadership.
Professional
responsibilities
Work autonomously
and be accountable for his/her professional actions.
Be responsible
for remaining up-to-date with CPD requirements to maintain professional
registration
To ensure own
educational commitment is at least sufficient to maintain CPD requirements and
to ensure own mandatory training certificates are current, in line with
organisational policy.
To offer clinical
leadership, support and training to colleagues and students.
To participate in
clinical supervision.
To demonstrate a
clear understanding of the accountability and legal implications of the role.
To participate in
a regular performance review with Clinical Pharmacist Manager, using agreed
competency framework appropriate to the individuals scope of practice.
Clinical
Responsibilities
Highlight
any gaps in knowledge/training needs to the Clinical Pharmacist Manager to
allow them the opportunity to offer support in order to fulfil the duties of
this post.
Remain
up-to-date with clinical guidelines to ensure that practice remains evidence
based.
Ensure
clinical practice is safe and effective and remains within the boundaries of
competence.
Work
in line with organisational policies and procedural guidelines.
Attend
and participate in practice meetings as required
This
role will evolve to meet the changing needs of the population and the Practice
Pharmacist should be prepared to undertake further training as required in
order to fulfil the duties of this post.
Clinical
governance
For
prescribers) Prescribe treatment in line with local and national guidelines and
CCG formulary.
Ensure
accurate and legible notes of all consultations and treatments are recorded
promptly in the patients notes on SystmOne.
Ensure
the safety of patients, relatives and colleagues and to report all incidents
and near misses in line with the risk management policy.
Remain
up-to-date with all mandatory training
Maintain
up-to-date knowledge of safeguarding adult and children guidance to ensure that
those at risk of abuse/suffering abuse are identified and the necessary process
to protect them is followed
Meet
responsibilities as an employee as set out in the organisations corporate and
clinical policies.
Maintain
confidentiality at all times.
This JD
is not intended to be an exhaustive list of activities but rather an outline of
the main areas of responsibility. The role is likely to evolve to meet the
changing needs of the service.
