Clinical Pharmacist

This is an exciting opportunity for enthusiastic and forward thinking LOCAL Pharmacists to join our established and growing team for 30 hours/ 4 days a week in providing meaningful, patient centred support in general practice to deliver:

Clinical Medicine review and long term condition clinics

Prescription requests, queries and prescribing efficiencies

Safe prescribing practice and audits

The post holder will need to demonstrate;

Good IT skills with the ability to obtain and analyse complex technical information

Recognise priorities when problem solving and identify deviations from normal patterns

Work effectively independently and as a team member

Demonstrate accountability for delivering professional expertise and direct service provision.

Patient facing Long-term condition clinics

See patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimization is required (e.g. Respiratory, cardiovascular, Diabetes.)

Review the on-going need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimization). Make appropriate recommendations to Senior Pharmacists or GPs for medicine improvement.

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for senior clinical pharmacist, nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.

Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.

Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.

Medicines support

Provide patient facing and telephoe clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice.

Medicine information to practice staff and patients

Answers relevant medicinerelated enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines.

Suggesting and recommending solutions.

Providing follow up for patients to monitor the effect of any changes

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 highrisk patient groups.

Management of medicines at discharge from hospital

To reconcile 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.

Set up and manage systems to ensure continuity of medicines supply to highrisk groups of patients (e.g. those with medicine compliance aids or those in care homes).

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.

Repeat prescribing

Implement the practice repeat prescribing policy within each PCN practice where required

Manage the repeat prescribing re-authorization process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and flagging up those needing a review.

Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.

Risk stratification

Identification of cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through pre-prepared practice computer searches. This might include risks that are patient related, medicine related, or both. The clinical pharmacists will be responsible for ensuring that all drugs that require regular monitoring are prescribed in a safe manner and that all necessary tests and procedures are carried out according to guidance. Examples of such drugs include NOACs, azathioprine, lithium, warfarin, methotrexate

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

Analyze, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision- making. This will include areas practices are contracted to improve. E.g. NSAID prescribing

Medicines quality improvement &safety

Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the practice team.

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

Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations

Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economys 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).

Monitor adherence to North Central Londons Medication Optimization Network

Auditing the practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance (TAG)

Assist practices in seeing and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on the practices computer system.

Auditing practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance.

Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.

Education and Training

Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimization. This will include local community pharmacists

The successful applicant will be based at Nightingale House Surgery 30 hours/ 4 days a week.

You will have a named Clinical Supervisor, and a named Senior Clinical Pharmacist for support and guidance.

Medicus Health Partners (MHP) is the lead practice for Unity PCN and will be the employing organisation. MHP is a super-partnership made up of 9 of the 17 PCN practices.

The successful applicants will have access to the training, support and governance systems in place at MHP.

The successful applicants will have the unique opportunity to help shape the development of pharmacy in general practice working closely with the PCN clinical directors and senior pharmacist colleagues.

Applications are welcome from those with existing primary care or GP practice experience, or applicants that have a keen interest to develop clinical experience in primary care.

Qualifications

Essential: - Masters degree in pharmacy (MPharm) (or equivalent)

Experience

Other

Essential: - Local to Enfield