Job responsibilities
Clinical Pharmacy
- During the daily clinical pharmacist ward visit:
- Review prescriptions to ensure they are legal, safe, cost-effective, clinically necessary, appropriate, accurate, and complete
- Provide information and advice to nursing staff and patients on a daily basis, about drugs, doses, administration and potential side-effects
- Provide similar information and advice to junior medical staff on a daily basis, and to Consultants as and when needed in both verbal and written form (e.g. Make entries in patient records)
- Access and interpret clinical information for patients, and use it to individualise and monitor treatment
- Arrange for drugs to be supplied to patients, wards and departments
- Undertake risk management and ensure compliance with legislation and relevant national policies and guidelines, along with local policies and procedures including the Trust Formulary.
- Work in an effective team with, and clinically supervise, pharmacy technicians involved in Trust Medicines Management scheme on designated wards
- Responsible for deciding stock holdings with the senior nurse for the ward
- Usually work unsupervised. The post holder is professionally accountable to the Clinical Pharmacy Manager and can seek advice from a range of senior colleagues as and when required.
Dispensary
- For allocated sessions or agreed periods each week act as the supervising pharmacist or Responsible Pharmacist in the dispensary.
- Clinically assess in-patients and Discharge prescriptions by reviewing current in-patient medication against Discharge prescription
- Check the prescriptions for: legality, legibility and intention of prescriber, that the medication is suitable for the patient, any errors in dose, frequency, form and route, determine specific patient requirements, resolving any queries with the prescriber and determining specific patient requirements
- May occasionally have to make decisions when prescribers are not available to clarify their intentions regarding ambiguous prescriptions.
- Assess Outpatient prescriptions as above
- Check the dispensing of the pharmacy technicians and pharmacy assistants/dispensers.
- Issue dispensed items to outpatients with appropriate information and advice on their medicines and how to take them, in language that is appropriate for them to understand, to promote effective use of medicines and concordance and answer queries raised by them.
- Ensure that out of stock items are assessed for urgency, notified to the patient/ward staff, obtained as soon as possible and dispensed promptly, to maintain treatment
- Check calculations for a range of prescription types.
- Dispense on occasion using the pharmacy computer for issuing medication.
- Respond to queries from medical staff and all other hospital staff.
- Supervise the clinical standards within the dispensary.
- Lock the department, to maintain safe and secure storage of all medication including controlled drugs.
- Help to supervise and train new pharmacy staff working in the dispensary.
- Provide a weekend pharmacy service during which the post holder may supervise other pharmacy staff providing that service.
Medicines Information
- Participate in the provision of the Medicines Information service in order to provide up to date, evaluated information on medicines, and give pharmaceutical advice to patients and healthcare professionals.
- In response to enquiries, advise health care professionals regarding the treatment of individual patients to optimise their drug therapy. Enquiries are of a diverse nature and examples include: - choice and effects of drugs in pregnancy or breastfeeding, identification and management of drug interactions and adverse drug reactions, drug choice and dosage in renal impairment and how to administer medicines.
- Answer enquiries from health care professionals on specific patient groups or disease states and make recommendations to help inform their practice for example: - the antidepressant of choice in epileptic patients.
- Answer enquiries from patients, empowering them with knowledge about their medications these will primarily originate from the Patients Medicines Helpline located in the Medicines Information department at GRH.
- Take in enquiries by telephone, use a variety of information sources and clinical knowledge to answer the enquiry and respond by agreed deadline by means of verbal or written communication.
- Develop communication skills in order to properly ascertain the nature of the enquiry and to provide the answer.
- Develop IT skills to enable retrieval of high-quality information from internet sources.
-Develop the ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines to evaluate information for the provision of urgently required clinical advice.
- Working largely under the supervision of senior colleagues, develop Medicines Information skills by undertaking an on-going programme of training (as defined by the United Kingdom Medicines Information Pharmacists Executive)
Pharmacy Manufacturing Unit (PMU)
- Work within the manufacturing unit and follow the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and worksheets within the area.
- Develop knowledge of aseptic preparation of pharmaceuticals to enable broader understanding for the checking and releasing of products.
- Perform an initial and final check and release on a range of aseptically prepared products prepared under section 10 e.g., Cytotoxics, adult parenteral nutrition (PN), and neonatal parenteral nutrition
- Perform an initial and a final check on MHRA licensed aseptic batches, pre-packed and over-labelled medicines.
- Perform a clinical check on adult cytotoxic prescriptions received in the department and intervene as necessary with prescribers (seeking advice from senior members of staff as necessary).
- Answer queries from patients and hospital staff on chemotherapy, parenteral nutrition and other operational manufacturing issues (referring to senior members of staff when appropriate).
- Work within a team and develop a broad range of communication skills to be able to liaise with both junior and senior pharmacy colleagues.
- Share knowledge and experience (clinical and technical) with pre-registration pharmacists and other staff within the manufacturing department as appropriate
- Be accountable for professional actions and activities, guided by legislation, national and local policies, procedures and protocols.
- Be able to work under pressure and to tight deadlines
Mental Health Pharmacy
- Support the mental health team and the clinical mental health pharmacy service to provide care to patients in mental health/learning disabilities inpatient units, and under mental health community services in Gloucestershire.
- Use the electronic medical notes and prescribing system
- Support clinical pharmacy services to inpatient wards and community mental health team bases
- Clinical validation by reviewing all prescriptions regularly, ensuring optimum dose, administration and compliance with legislation.
- Improving patients adherence with medication
- Attending weekly multidisciplinary team meetings:
- Advising on individual drug treatments, including possible side effects and interactions after appropriate mentoring.
- Reviewing and rationalising patients medication.
- Encouraging compliance with national protocols, and local guidelines and formularies.
- Educating patients and carers, including individual counselling on newly prescribed medicines and discharge counselling for patients giving both written and verbal information as appropriate
- Maintaining appropriate clinical documentation and records, including intervention/contribution monitoring and outcome data
- Participating with pharmacists, technicians and assistant technical officers to ensure a smooth, efficient and co-ordinated overall service.
- Undertaking medicines reconciliation assurance in conjunction with the Medicines Management Technicians
- Accessing and interpreting patients test results, including the use of clozapine patient monitoring systems.
- Compiling electronic discharge medication summaries & uploading them onto the electronic clinical notes
- Other duties include
- Working in or out of the pharmacy department using laptops or desktop computers, writing reports and letters.
- Checking prescriptions, writing policies / discharge summaries & performing calculations.
- Dealing with emergency requests for information on wards, having interruptions during the day to answer queries, responding to email queries.
- Visiting wards, talking to mental health patients and healthcare professionals. Having awareness of mentally ill, patients.
Clinical Oncology
- Provide a daily ward visit to an oncology ward providing the same service as described in section 1 above (clinical pharmacy)
- Clinically screen prescriptions for systemic anti-cancer therapy (SACT) in the chemotherapy outpatient department at CGH
- Gain some accompanied experience at Sue Ryder hospice
- Gain experience in haematology
- Attend the ward MDT weekly as the rota allows
Non-medical prescribing
If an annotated independent prescriber with the GPhC the pharmacist will:
- Undertake prescribing in line with the Scope of Practice for Newly Qualified Pharmacist Prescribers in Secondary Care (South West Chief Pharmacist Group) and local policies.
Contact Details
Delyth Morton (Lead Pharmacist for Education and Training)
delyth.morton@nhs.net
0300 422 4787
Paul Adams
Lead pharmacist for Medicines Information
paul.adams@nhs.net
0300 422 6108
