PCN Clinical Pharmacist

The post holder will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role. The post holder will take responsibility for areas of chronic disease management within the practice and undertake clinical medication reviews to proactively manage patients with complex polypharmacy.

The post holder will provide support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medication queries. They will help support the repeat prescription 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 patient in the GP practice.

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 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 an excellent service within general practice.

Key duties and responsibilities

Patient facing Long term condition clinics

See (where appropriate) patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required (e.g. COPD, asthma)

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 optimisation)

Make appropriate recommendations to GPs for medicine improvement.

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations on prescribing and monitoring.

Patient facing care home medication reviews

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations on prescribing and monitoring. Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.

Patient facing domiciliary clinical medication review

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations on prescribing and monitoring. Attend and refer patients to multidisciplinary case conferences.

Management of common/minor/self limiting ailments

Managing caseload of patients with common/minor/self-limiting ailments while working within a scope of practice and limits of competence

Signposting to community pharmacy and referring to GPs or other healthcare professionals where appropriate.

Patient facing medicines support

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

Telephone medicines support

Provide a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.

Medicine information to practice staff and patients

Answers relevant medicine-related 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

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

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.

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

Medicines safety

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)

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 optimisation.

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

Public health

To support public health campaigns

To provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.

Recognises the roles of other colleagues within the organisation and their role to patient care

Demonstrates use of appropriate communication to gain the co-operation of relevant stakeholders (including patients, senior and peer colleagues, and other professionals, other NHS/private organisations e.g. CCGs)

Demonstrates ability to work as a member of a team

Is able to recognise personal limitations and refer to more appropriate colleague(s) when necessary

Blue PCN is made up of a group of GP practices working together, in partnership.

Our Team includes Clinical Pharmacists, First Contact Physiotherapists, Care Coordinators and Social Prescribing Link Workers who work within our below member practices:

Qualifications

Knowledge and Skills