Pharmacist

Job description

Job responsibilities

Clinical and Patient Client Care

Manage own case load of patients and deliver services where you are proud to put the patient first with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence.

Provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice, especially for long term conditions and signpost to community pharmacy and referring to GPs or other healthcare professionals where appropriate where patients with single or multiple medical problems or where medicine optimisation is beyond the scope of competence (e.g. Respiratory, Cardiovascular and Diabetes).

Provide follow up for patients to monitor the effect of any changes from suggestions and recommendations made, including virtual advice for patients with questions, queries, and concerns about their medicines and answers relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other network staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.

Using structured medication reviews, support patients to take their medications to get the best from them, reduce waste and promote selfcare.

Liaises with BHNC colleagues including BHNC pharmacists on prescribing related matters to ensure consistency of patient care and benefit.

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.

Work in partnership with hospital colleagues to proactively manage patients at high risk of medicine related problems before they are discharged to ensure continuity of care. Reconciles 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.

On every occasion, produces accurate, contemporaneous, and complete records of patient consultation, consistent with legislation, policies, standards, and procedures.

Financial & Resources

To be accountable for adhering to the budget, ensuring best value for money, and identifying efficiencies as appropriate, ensuring senior managers are aware of the cost implications of any areas of non-compliance.

To manage resources required for key duties under this Job Description, ensuring value for money at all times and maintain budget management responsibility allocated to the job holder in line with the scheme of delegation, develop, where required, cost-benefit analysis for spending and initiatives.

Actively works toward developing and maintaining effective working relationships both within and outside the PCN. To develop and facilitate a good working relationship with community pharmacists and other local providers of healthcare.

Liaises with colleagues including BHNC, STP/ICS Pharmacists and Pharmacy Technicians, Heads of Medicines Management/Optimisation to benefit from peer support on prescribing related matters to ensure consistency of patient care and benefit.

Foster and maintain strong links with all services across the PCN and neighbouring networks.

Explores the potential for collaborative working and takes opportunities to initiate and sustain such key working relationships with stakeholders as needed for the collective benefit of patients.

Research & Development

Contributes toward the development and embedding of the BHNC and PCN visions, aims and business objectives.

Provides advice to projects and business change initiatives regarding prescribing and makes appropriate recommendations to Senior Pharmacists or GPs for medicine improvement.

Reviews and monitors the on-going need for each patients medicine and support them with their medicines ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation).

Supports public health campaigns, providing specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacist, nurses or GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.

Undertakes clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacists, nurses and GPs on prescribing and monitoring, and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences, ensuring medicines optimisation at every opportunity.

Reviews the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions through audit and individual patient reviews. Putting in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.

Be a part of a professional clinical network, having access to appropriate clinical supervision. Appropriate clinical supervision includes:

Each clinical pharmacist must receive a minimum of one supervision session per month by a senior clinical pharmacist,

The senior clinical pharmacist must receive a minimum of one supervision session every three months by a GP clinical supervisor,

Each clinical pharmacist will have access to an assigned GP clinical supervisor for support and development, and

A ratio of one senior clinical pharmacist to no more than five junior clinical pharmacists, with appropriate peer support and supervision in place.

Policy & Service Development

Contributes pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have medicinal components (e.g. advice on treatment pathways and patient information leaflets).

Produces and implements a practice repeat prescribing policy and manages the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates; make necessary changes as an independent prescriber, and ensure patients are booked in for necessary monitoring tests where required.

Undertakes clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the relevant practice team and supports the delivery of the prescribing safety quality improvement domain.

Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.

Monitors practice prescribing against the local health economys RAG list for medicines and make recommendations to GPs for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors (red drugs) or subject to shared care (amber drugs). Assists practices in seeing and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on each practices computer system.

Audits practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance and National Skills Framework (NSF).

Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.

Work with the general practice teams to ensure the practices are compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.

Attends local, regional and national meetings of relevance some of which will be defined within the national GP pathway for this role supported by Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE).

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• Essential criteria
• General Practice Pharmacist Training Pathway from CPPE, or equivalent qualification is already held or willing to work towards, and exemption is agreed by CPPE.
• Mandatory registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council Masters degree in pharmacy (MPharm) or equivalent qualification/experience.
• Safeguarding and other mandatory training Basic life support training.
• Membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and completed Independent prescriber course.

Experience

Essential

• Minimum of 2 years experience as a pharmacist, demonstrated within a practice portfolio.
• Experience of partnership/collaborative working and of building relationships across a variety of organisations.
• Experience and an awareness of the breadth of common acute and long-terms conditions that are likely to be seen in general practice.
• An appreciation of the nature of the nature of GPs, practices and primary care prescribing concepts of rational prescribing and strategies for improving prescribing.

Desirable

• In depth therapeutic and clinical knowledge and understanding of the principles of evidence-based healthcare.

OTHER

Essential

• Able to obtain and analyse complex technical data and information.
• Able to identify and resolve risk management issues according to policy/protocol.
• Recognises priorities when problem solving and identifies deviations from the normal pattern and is able to refer these where required for resolution.
• Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision making.
• Excellent interpersonal, influencing and negotiation, written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrable ability to communicate complex and sensitive information in an understandable form to a variety of audiences (e.g. patients).
• Able to appropriately build relationships to gain the cooperation of relevant stakeholders (including patients, senior and peer colleagues, other professionals).
• Able to gain acceptance influence, motivate, persuade and engage audiences in agreed course of action where there may be significant barriers to overcome.

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

Bexley Health Neighbourhood Care CIC

Address

Sidcup Medical Centre

2 Church Avenue

Sidcup

Kent

DA14 6BU

Employer's website

https://www.bhnc.org.uk/ (Opens in a new tab)