Clinical PharmacistinBourneinBournePUBLISHED THU 27 FEB 2025

This is an opportunity to join our team of dedicated professionals providing services to some 12,500 patients in the rural market town of Bourne, Lincolnshire. Our existing Clinical Pharmacist is sadly leaving to explore pastures new as part of her own personal development and would be happy to talk with anyone regarding this role and the opportunities it provides. Please contact the recruiting lead to arrange this. Informal visits are also welcome.

The role is practice based, managing patients face to face from your own clinical room and via the telephone.

We are a total triage practice using Accurx+ and so patients are appropriately managed to the healthcare professional best able to meet the patient need.

Assessed in August of 2023 as Outstanding by the CQC we strive to deliver high quality, responsive care for our patients while ensuring we have high staff numbers, a great range of skills mix and administrative support systems in place to ensuring this is a great place to work, even in these demanding times for General Practice.

We enjoy modern, expansive and fully compliant premises.

This is a senior post within our team attracting a salary of between £58,400 to £68,400 subject to experience. There is also an annual training grant, 35 days annual leave plus Bank Holidays and 2 study days. The post provides access to the NHS Pension scheme.

We have separated the main duties of the role into two elements; essential and desirable. Our current CP covers both elements and our new team member should do the same or there must be a willingness to train for and ultimately provide the desirable roles also.

Essential:

Non-medical prescriber (or willingness to train subject to a training support agreement)

Previous experience in a GP setting

Chronic Disease Management Oversight and management of long-term conditions, sounder understanding in asthma, COPD, diabetes, chronic kidney disease, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, and hypertension. This will include telephone and face to face appointments.

Medication Safety & Governance Keeping on top of audits, using ECLIPSE and other patient safety tools to manage care

Ability to conduct medication reviews and Structured medication reviews (and identifying when SMRS are needed)

Aiding workflow- management of discharge summaries, patient letters

Helping the team with medication queries, alternate medications and general advice

Medical Education & Training Providing sessions for medical students and trainee nurses.

Desirable:

Knowledge of minor ailments

Interpretation of blood tests: B12, Vitamin D, TSH, ACR (or more if able)

Some understanding of managing contraception, pain management (non palliative), psoriasis, eczema, acne, HRT, mental health.

Completion of CPPE Primary Care Education Pathway (or willingness to complete it)

About us

The full job description is attached as an additional document.

Primary Duties and Areas of Responsibility

Patient facing long-term condition clinics

See patients with single or multiple medical problems, where medicines optimisation is required (e.g. COPD, asthma, ischaemic heart disease).

Review the on-going need for each medicine, ensure that monitoring is up to date, and support patients to get the most benefit from their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation). Make appropriate recommendations to Senior Pharmacists or GPs for improvements in treatment regimes.

Patient facing clinical medication review

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

Patient facing care home medication reviews

Undertake person-centred, clinical medication reviews with patients, and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacist, nurses or GPs on prescribing and monitoring.

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

Patient facing domiciliary clinical medication review

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients, and produce recommendations for the senior clinical pharmacists, nurses and GPs 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 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 within your base practice, for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.

Telephone medicines support

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

Medicines information to practice staff and patients

Answer relevant medicinesrelated enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients. Suggest and recommend solutions.

Provide follow up for patients, to monitor the effect of any changes.

Unplanned hospital admissions

Using prescribing support tools such as Eclipse and PINCER, review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions, through audit and individual patient reviews. Document findings in audit reports, conduct root cause analyses for any errors, and put systems in place to address any prescribing safety issues.

Management of medicines at discharge from hospital

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).

Signposting

Ensure that patients are referred to other healthcare professionals for the required level of care within an appropriate timeframe e.g. pathology results, common/minor ailments, acute conditions, long term condition reviews etc.

Repeat prescribing

Produce and implement a practice repeat prescribing policy, in agreement with the Senior Clinical Pharmacist.

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 clinical decision making.

Medicines quality improvement

Undertake clinical audits, in areas of prescribing as directed by the GPs; feed the results back to the practice team, 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, as well as any prescribing safety incidents identified within your base practice, ensuring any findings are shared with the PCN pharmacy team.

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.

Care Quality Commission

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

Public health

Support public health campaigns.

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

Development Opportunities: We are looking to further develop our medication review system with a desire to innovate a tiered level medication review system and the CP will have the opportunity lead a team of pharmacy techs to develop proactive recall of patients not on a chronic disease registers.