Pharmacy Business Manager

Job description

Job responsibilities

Leadership, Managerial and Service Improvement

Contribute to Pharmacy Senior Team, including input in decision making for pharmacy service and external teams or departments.

Provide line management to all members of the Pharmacy Business Team in their duties to ensure procurement activities are delivered efficiently, utilising IT solutions where possible and rationalisation of information kept.

Responsible for overseeing training plans for all new and rotational Business Team staff

Facilitate problem solving and engagement between pharmacy, finance, clinical staff and commissioners to ensure Tariff Excluded Drugs are used according to NICE guidance and locally agreed prescribing pathways.

Identify and implement IT solutions to pharmacy projects including Procurement and Electronic Invoicing. Developing IT solutions in liaison with providers to ensure that systems meet the needs of the Pharmacy Department.

Support pharmacy staff education and training in the role of NVQ Assessor and Internal Verifier

Review and audit pharmacy processes and data to identify causes of variation and recommend potential improvements to efficiency.

Responsible for the recruitment and development and line management of staff in the Pharmacy Business Team.

Follow HR disciplinary and performance management procedures for line managed staff in line with trust procedures.

Finance, Commissioning and Tariff Excluded Drugs

Responsible for accurate in-system flagging of Tariff Excluded Drugs and providing month-end reports in the format required for trust finance to produce the Minimum Data-Set (mds) required by commissioners.

To provide High Cost Drugs information from the pharmacy stock control system, Epact (FP10 data) and other sources and support the Finance Department to ensure that the Trust receives monies due.

To be familiar with annual and mid-year changes to commissioning and ensure that the pharmacy stock system reflects changes to allow accurate reporting for preparation of invoices to the commissioners.

Work with commissioners, finance, contracts, clinicians, Divisional Managers and Divisional Lead Pharmacists to analyse current usage and spend data for Tariff Excluded Drugs to provide rationalised horizon scanning for future years.

Utilise current data to monitor actual drugs spend and usage against previous horizon scanning to produce a narrative where variance exists.

Devise specialist reports to monitor Tariff Excluded Drug values and their potential impact on the Trust. This includes production and interpretation of management and financial data and performance indicators as directed by the Chief Pharmacist. This involves creating and validating information within spreadsheets and databases.

Responsible for managing funding approval requests initiated within the trust for the use of Tariff Excluded Drugs, using the national and local commissioner mandated Blueteq online database. Where a commissioner does not utilise Blueteq to monitor compliance with NICE guidance, the post-holder ensures that in-house auditable records are kept.

Report on the impact of changes to the commissioning requirements of the Cancer Drug Fund (CDF), Specialist Commissioning Group (NHS England) and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and highlight issues to relevant prescribers.

Responsible for advising the department and the wider organisation on how National and Regional procurement and clinical guidelines should be interpreted with regards to financial impact, funding routes and trust approval pathways for medication.

To act as delegated budget holder for the departmental budget, including sign off of pharmaceutical orders, timesheets and capital spend as appropriate.

Purchasing, Medicines Invoice Payment, and Sales Invoices

Ensure Pharmacy Business Team meet the requirements of the Carter Report and NHS IT Strategy.

Ensure invoices are paid in a timely manner, resolving disputes effectively and providing mediational support where required. Actively seeking out process improvement opportunities.

Responsible for ensuring the successful weekly upload of accounts payable (AP) information to SBS Oracle.

Responsible for ensuring invoice requests for medicines sales and pharmacy support activities are requisitioned to service level and ad-hoc customers.

Partnerships and Collaborative Working

Communicate and manage cross-charging of outsourced tailor made parenteral medicines procured via the partnership with Royal Surrey County Hospital (RSCH) and other trusts where applicable.

Communicating estimated monthly invoice values to RSCH and the trust finance team to enable a timely invoicing process and appropriate accruals.

Technology or System Support

Oversee training, accessibility and the development of user roles for the pharmacy stock control system, dispensing robot and prescription tracker

Develop and maintain procedures for the pharmacy IT systems, medicines purchasing and invoicing.

Ensuring the efficient operation of the current integrated EMIS Hospital Pharmacy stock control system, including maintaining standalone functions for use in the event of systems failure. Liaise with the system supplier, network providers and others as necessary to overcome difficulties in the operation of the system.

Create cost centres and consultants on EMIS Hospital Pharmacy liaise with finance and specialty managers and PAS (patient administration system) administrators to ensure these are correctly linked to Directorates and Specialty cost centres and PAS interface codes.

Check accuracy of new drug entries, amendments and patient details on the pharmacy systems to ensure that systems of work are clinically safe and effective to use.

Responsible for co-ordinating the daily system backup and regular housekeeping tasks, system integrity checks and other software tasks as appropriate.

Maintain and develop the use of the Pharmacy automated dispensing system.

Authorise orders and payments for the purchase of IT hardware, software, upgrades and maintenance.

Project manage IT systems installations and updates; including negotiating with IT providers and authorisation of orders and payments for the purchase of IT hardware, software, upgrades and maintenance, staff resourcing for training and implementation and scheduling of work to fit in with the needs of the department.

Attend external User Group meetings for pharmacy as required.

Reporting

Produce routine reports for distribution to finance, senior pharmacy staff and external organisations as required.

Compile reports on pay and non-pay expenditure

Produce ad hoc reports for auditing and other purposes.

Analyse and interpret complex data and provide it in a format that meets the requester needs, linking with other Trust activity information to provide insight into pharmacy data and using external sources to provide efficiency and quality benchmarks.

Produce pharmacy responses to Freedom of Information Requests regarding drug usage and spend.

Use the prescription tracker database to produce statistical reports to enable analysis of workload and prescription turnaround times.

Communications and Engagement

Liaise with the Clinical Lead Pharmacists, Divisional Pharmacists, Service Managers, clinicians and specialist nurses to analyse and interpret expenditure on drugs and to highlight cost pressures relating to drug expenditure for feedback to Divisional Pharmacists and the Drugs & Therapeutics Committee.

Lead on process reviews with the specialty clinician leads, service managers and others involved.

Act as a first point of contact for trust specialty teams wishing to apply for funding for Tariff Excluded Drugs.

Ensure all changes to commissioning are communicated to the relevant clinical teams.

Oversee training and the writing of procedures for utilising the various funding request systems which are used by staff inside and outside of the pharmacy department.

Work with Health Informatics and Finance to implement automated links between Pharmacy systems and other Trust systems such as Service Line Reporting.

Report on the impact of clinical polices annual prioritisation plan and highlight issues to relevant prescribers and other interested parties.

Homecare Medicines

Manage processes and team functions for homecare to ensure that:

Tariff-Excluded medicines provided via homecare receive appropriate commissioner funding for the duration of the prescription period.

Homecare prescriptions are recorded electronically on the Pharmacy Prescription Tracker and that electronic copies of the prescriptions are made available on the trust shared Teams drive

Tracker records and electronic prescriptions are made available to the clinical teams

Contribute to quarterly Key Performance Indicator review meetings with homecare providers, including feeding back areas for improvement and complaints.

Liaise directly with homecare providers to manage the transfer of groups of patients to alternative therapies, for example biosimilars, or to alternative providers.

Set up and review contracts and SLAs with homecare providers.

Ensure Homecare providers are notified in a timely manner of any contract price changes.

Person Specification

Qualifications

Essential

• NVQ Level 3

Experience

Essential

• Intermediate/Advanced skills with Microsoft Excel and databases.
• Able to interpret high volumes of data and present to varied audience.

Desirable

• Knowledge of Ascribe Pharmacy system.

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.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).

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

Ashford & St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Address

St Peters Hospital

Chertsey

KT16 0PZ

Employer's website

https://www.ashfordstpeters.nhs.uk/ (Opens in a new tab)