Clinical Lead Pharmacist in General Practice

Clinical Lead Pharmacist in General Practice

Contract: Permanent. Hours: 37.5 hours per week

Location: Tetbury and Cirencester

Innovative and progressive with Surgeries in Cirencester and Tetbury, we are looking for an enthusiastic Clinical Pharmacist to work as part of the multi-disciplinary team.

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a dynamic and committed Clinical Pharmacist to deliver high-quality care in a patient-facing environment. The post holder will provide expertise in clinical pharmacy and medicines optimisation. You will lead quality improvement projects and provide leadership for medicines use to ensure patients experience high-quality primary care.

We are looking for a prescriber with excellent communication skills who can establish themselves in the role of Practice-based pharmacy. As part of this role, you will be expected to undertake CPPE training (unless already completed).

Main duties of the job

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 primary support to general practice staff is provided with regards to prescription and medication queries. They will ensure that their team helps to support with the repeat prescriptions system, deal with acute prescription requests, and medicines reconciliation on transfer of care and systems for safer prescribing, providing expertise in clinical medicines advice while addressing both public and social care needs of patients in the GP practice(s).

The post holder will ensure that the practice integrates with community and hospital pharmacy 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 general practice.

There is scope for the right candidate to develop the job role in the future to include other elements such as Long-term Condition management in a clinic setting for example.

Job responsibilities

Primary Duties and Areas of Responsibility

Build and Lead the Practice Pharmacy Team

• Provide leadership and support for the entire Pharmacy Team, ensuring workload is effectively managed and delegated.
• Act as first point of contact regarding HR relating queries, ensuring that Pharmacy Team are working within Practice Protocols and Policies.
• Support the practice with recruitment to ensure that the team remains robust and effective.
• Identify and manage areas of development and concern and raise appropriately with Partners.

Medicine information to practice staff

• Ensure medicine-related queries from GPs, other practice staff and other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy, frailty service nurses, care home ANPs) are answered, suggesting and recommending solutions.

Repeat prescribing

• Collaborate on 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 and flagging up those needing a review.
• Conduct structured medication reviews.

Management of medicines at discharge from hospital

• To ensure medicines are reconciled following discharge from hospitals, intermediate care and into care homes.
• 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).

Unplanned hospital admissions

• 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 high-risk patient groups.

Service development

• 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 audits of prescribing in areas requiring review, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the pharmacy team.

Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations

• Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economy's 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).

Care Quality Commission

• Work with the general practice team to ensure the practice is compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Completion of an undergraduate degree in pharmacy and registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council.
• Expected to undertake CPPE training (unless already completed).
• May hold or be working towards an independent prescribing qualification.
• May be clinical systems trained (SystemOne).

Experience

• Minimum of 2 years experience as a pharmacist, demonstrated within a practice portfolio.
• Has experience and an awareness of common acute and long-term conditions that are likely to be seen in general practice.

Other

• Full driving licence/Ability to travel to all sites.

Knowledge/Skills

• Recognises priorities when problem-solving and identifies deviations from normal pattern and is able to refer to seniors or GPs when appropriate.
• Able to follow legal, ethical, professional and organisational policies/procedures and codes of conduct.
• Involves patients in decisions about prescribed medicines and supporting adherence as per NICE guidelines.
• Demonstrate understanding of the pharmacy role in governance and is able to implement this appropriately within the workplace.
• Demonstrates an ability to lead and support colleagues within the practice pharmacy team.

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.