Clinical Pharmacist

The post holder will provide primary support to general practice staff with regard to prescription and medicines management at different sites. They will help support the repeat prescription system, deal with acute prescription requests, and medicines reconciliation on the 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).

They will deliver an efficient, cost-effective, and high-quality clinical service by providing clinical and professional development to the clinical workforce within K&W Healthcare & member practices.

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

• Demonstrate a significant reduction in the amount of GP time spent (especially locum GP time) by seeing patients in appointment slots for clinical medication reviews, and responding to urgent medication requests and queries. Complex patients or those with additional needs may require longer appointment slots.
• Review the ongoing need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs, and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines. Ensuring they get the best use of their medicines
• Minor ailments triage:
  Managing caseload of patients with common /minor/self-limiting ailments requesting GP appointments and triaging patients appropriately.
• Provide patient-facing clinics for those patients with questions, queries, and concerns about their medication in order to improve medication adherence.
• Minor ailments appointment slots – as appropriate
• Contribute to multidisciplinary reviews about medication-related issues
• Reconcile medicines following hospital discharge
• Review daily pathology results for selected patients on known medicines
• Targeted medication reviews particularly in high-risk patients (frail elderly, poly-pharmacy, renaland hepatic impairment, high-risk medicines, etc.)
• Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the nurses and GPs on prescribing.
• Administer influenza and travel vaccines
• Support practices with the management of patients with drug dependence and alcohol-related disorders.
• Signpost patients to other services or sources of information in addition to medication information when necessary in order to improve the general health and well-being of patients.
• Make appropriate recommendations to the senior clinical pharmacist or GPs for medical improvement.
• Unplanned Admissions and Discharge
• Review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and readmissions through audits and individual patient reviews.
• Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
• 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 medicine supply to high-risk groups of patients (e.g. those with medicine compliance aids or those in care homes).

• Assist with QOF targets, especially with the management of long-term conditions:
  Asthma, COPD, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure- seeing these patients where their long-term condition needs to be reviewed or where dose optimizations and monitoring are required as per guidelines.
• Undertake training/certification in health assessments, history taking, and physical examination. Commit to starting an independent prescribing course within 6 months of the probationary period ending
• Reduce inappropriate poly-pharmacy.
• Address medicines adherence with patients and provide follow-up phone calls to check progress.

• Increase quality and safety of prescribing through regular K&W audits and practice-specific audits
• Implement drug withdrawals and alerts e.g. MHRA aimed at improving medicines safety
• Implementing medication-related NICE guidelines
• Identification of cohorts of patients at high risk of harm from medicines through practice computer searches.
• Repeat prescribing process
• Link with the community and hospital pharmacies about discharges and repeat prescribing queries.
• Improve the repeat…