Primary Care Network Senior Clinical Pharmacist

Greenwich Health Ltd; City Of London; On-site; GBP 45,000 - 60,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading GP Federation in the UK is seeking a Senior Clinical Pharmacist to work within a multi-disciplinary team, providing patient-facing support and managing co-morbidities. The ideal candidate will have extensive clinical knowledge, registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council, and a passion for improving patient care. Competitive remuneration and various employee benefits are offered.

Benefits

Occupational sickness pay

Counselling services

Electric Vehicle Salary Sacrifice Scheme

Cycle to Work Scheme

Private Healthcare Membership

Ongoing support and mentorship

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years post-qualification experience.
• In-depth therapeutic and clinical knowledge.
• Registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council.

Responsibilities

• Work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role.
• Proactively manage patients with co-morbidities.
• Provide clinical leadership on medicines optimisation.

Skills

Clinical knowledge

Interpersonal skills

Medicines management

Education

Postgraduate diploma or equivalent training

Job description

Primary Care Network Senior Clinical Pharmacist

The post holder will be employed by Greenwich Health, the GP Federation. The post holder will work with Riverview Health PCN, a grouping of 5 practices. Riverview has a team of clinical pharmacists working to deliver practice support but also PCN level work which means the individual pharmacists are part of a wider team.

The post holder will work as part of a multi‑disciplinary team in a patient‑facing role.

Proactively manage patients with co‑morbidities.

Provide support to general practice staff with regard to prescription and medication queries. 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 patients in the GP practices.

Provide leadership on medicines optimisation and quality improvement and manage some aspects of the quality and outcomes framework and enhanced services.

Main duties of the job

The post holder will preferably be an independent prescriber (not essential) and has experience of working in primary care. Will need to be able to:

• Hold patient facing reviews and provide medicine support
• Manage medicines in discharges from hospital
• Hold long‑term conditions clinics
• Be a centre of medicines information for practice staff
• Support and adhere to repeat prescribing processes
• Support medicines safety and local/national guidelines

About us

Greenwich Health is the GP Federation for the Greenwich Borough and have a not‑for‑profit ethos. This means we reinvest all of our surplus into developing our staff, our organisation and to support our GP Practices in being sustainable for the future. We are committed to providing quality of care to our patients whilst building resilience for General Practice and providing services and programmes of work to deliver care at scale to the Greenwich Population.

Why work for Greenwich Health?

• We are local organisation owned by our local GP Practices we care what happens in Greenwich and want to make a difference to our patients and our partners.
• We offer competitive remuneration as well as other benefits including:
• Occupational sickness pay entitlement
• Counselling services
• Electric Vehicle Salary Sacrifice Scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Private Healthcare Membership – Benenden Healthcare
• We have a track record for developing individuals in their careers
• Through our partnerships in our local healthcare environment, we can develop shared posts for example, with the hospital trust and our GP practices.
• You will have ongoing support and mentorship.
• We have developed a working culture which harnesses openness and togetherness which has resulted in high staff retention rates.

Job responsibilities

The post holder will be employed by Greenwich Health, the GP Federation in Greenwich. Greenwich has 6 primary care networks (PCNs) with list sizes of between 30-80,000 patients. The post holder will work for one of these PCN, a grouping of 6 practices. Unusually the post holder will be working across two member practices with a combined list of 10,000.

The post holder will work as part of a multi‑disciplinary team in a patient‑facing role.

Proactively manage patients with co‑morbidities in the area of chronic disease management within the practice.

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

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 role is pivotal to improving the quality of care and operational efficiencies so requires motivation and passion to deliver excellent service within general practice.

Individual responsibilities

• Adhere to organisation policies and procedures and relevant legislation including the requirements of any professional bodies.
• Maintain satisfactory personal performances and professional standards and to achieve agreed objectives for their role.
• Attend mandatory training as identified by the organisation.
• Participate in a Performance Appraisal Scheme and to contribute to their own development and the development of any staff they are responsible for appraising.
• Responsible to have professional indemnity suitable for the range of work undertaking.
• Responsible to have authorisation for making changes to prescribing records within the practice. This may be by written agreement or GP signature for specific audits.

Working relationships

• Patients and carers where appropriate
• GPs, nurses and other practice staff including practice pharmacists
• GP prescribing leads
• CCG pharmacists and medicines management team
• Secondary Care and interface pharmacists
• Community nurses and other allied health professionals
• Community pharmacists and support staff

Health & safety

The post‑holder will assist in promoting and maintaining their own and others health, safety and security as defined in the practice Health & Safety Policy, to include:

• Using personal security systems within the workplace according to practice guidelines.
• Identifying the risks involved in work activities and undertaking such activities in a way that manages those risks.
• Making effective use of training to update knowledge and skills.
• Using appropriate infection control procedures, maintaining work areas in a tidy and safe way and free from hazards reporting potential risks identified.

Equality and diversity

The post‑holder will support the equality, diversity and rights of patients, carers and colleagues, to include:

• Acting in a way that recognises the importance of people’s rights, interpreting them in a way that is consistent with Practice procedures and policies, and current legislation.
• Respecting the privacy, dignity, needs and beliefs of patients, carers and colleagues.
• Behaving in a manner which is welcoming to and of the individual, is non‑judgemental and respects their circumstances, feeling priorities and rights.

Professional and personal development

The post‑holder will participate in any training programme implemented by the PCN as part of this employment, such training to include:

• Participation in an annual individual performance review, including taking responsibility for maintaining a record of own personal and/or professional development.
• Taking responsibility for own development, learning and performance, and demonstrating skill and activities to others who are undertaking similar work.
• Training may need to be undertaken outside of normal practice hours, and off site.

The PCN have invested in support from an organisation called Soar Beyond. Soar Beyond specialises in supporting the creation of teams of pharmacists across a network of practices. It is supported by a web platform called SMART which assesses pharmacist competency levels in a range of different disease areas and is backed up by training programmes to develop the individual where there might be gaps that the individual and the PCN would like to be filled. Currently the team is working towards competency in Diabetes management and the PCN is implementing a pharmacist‑led Diabetes pathway to be used across practices.

Quality and governance

The post‑holder will strive to maintain quality within the PCN, and will:

• Alert other team members to issues of quality and risk.
• Assess own performance and take accountability for own actions, either directly or under supervision.
• Work effectively with individuals in other agencies.
• Effectively manage own time, workload and resources.

Confidentiality

In the course of seeking treatment, patients entrust us with, or allow us to gather, sensitive information in relation to their health and other matters. They do so in confidence and have the right to expect that staff will respect their privacy, act appropriately and in accordance with the practice policies and procedures relating to confidentiality and the protection of personal and sensitive data.

Education & requests

Patient‑facing clinical medication reviews with patients with multimorbidity and poly‑pharmacy and implement own prescribing changes (as an independent prescriber) and order relevant monitoring tests.

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

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 manage these changes without referral to a GP.

Perform a clinical medication review, produce a post‑discharge medicines care plan including dose titration and booking of follow‑up tests and working with patients and community pharmacists to ensure patients receive the medicines they need post‑discharge.

Work in partnership with hospital colleagues (e.g. care of the elderly doctors and clinical pharmacists) to proactively manage patients at high risk of medicine‑related problems before they are discharged to ensure continuity of care.

Manage own case load and run long‑term condition clinics where responsible for prescribing as an independent prescriber (if suitably qualified).

Review the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicine taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation).

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

Medicine information to practice staff and patients.

Answers 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

Devise and implement practice searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an unplanned admission and readmissions from medicines.

Telephone triage

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 test results, common/minor ailments, acute conditions, long‑term condition reviews etc.

Repeat prescribing

Produce and implement a practice repeat prescribing policy. Manage the repeat prescribing re‑authorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates; make necessary changes as an independent prescriber, and ensure patients are booked in for necessary monitoring tests where required.

Information management

Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision making.

Identify national and local policy and guidance that affect patient safety through the use of medicines, including MHRA alerts, product withdrawals and emerging evidence from clinical trials.

Manage the process of implementing changes to medicines and guidance for practitioners.

Person specification

Qualifications

• Specialist knowledge acquired through postgraduate diploma level or equivalent training/experience.

Experience

• Minimum 5 years post‑qualification experience.
• In‑depth therapeutic and clinical knowledge and understanding of the principles of evidence‑based healthcare.
• An appreciation of the nature of GPs and general practices.

Professional registration

• Registration with the General Pharmaceutical Council.
• Membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
• Member of or working towards Faculty membership of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Other

• Demonstrate the ability to communicate complex and sensitive information in an understandable form to a variety of audiences.
• Excellent interpersonal, influencing and negotiating skills.
• Demonstrates accountability for delivering professional expertise and direct service provision.

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.