The post holder will provide primary support to general practice staff with regards to prescription and medicines management. 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 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 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 excellent service within general practice. The post-holder will deliver a comprehensive range of high-quality pharmaceutical services, to include the assessment of patients at K&W sites, practices, care homes and as required attend housebound patients. They will be able to consult on the telephone, via the internet and face to face.
Main duties of the job
- Clinical reviews/input
- QOF targets
- Audits
- Public Health
Job responsibilities
Clinical reviews/input
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, respond 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 – patient ages 2-70, weekday mornings, 7 - 15 minute appointments for minor ailment consultations.
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, renal and hepatic impairment, high-risk medicines etc.).
Undertake clinical medication review with patients and produce recommendations for the nurses and GPs on prescribing.
Support practices with 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 wellbeing of patients.
Make appropriate recommendations to the senior clinical pharmacist or GPs for medicines improvement.
Unplanned Admissions and Discharge
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 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 medicines 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 management of long-term conditions: Asthma, COPD, diabetes, hypertension, heart failure- seeing these patients where their long-term condition needs to be reviewed or where dose optimisations 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 probationary period ending.
Reduce inappropriate poly-pharmacy.
Address medicines adherence with patients and provide follow-up phone calls to check progress.
Audits and Risk Stratification
- 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.
- Implement 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 community and hospital pharmacy about discharges and repeat prescribing queries.
- Improve the repeat prescribing process within K&W practices by working extensively with dispensing community pharmacy. Communicating with them more effectively about medication queries.
- Implement and manage the repeat dispensing process.
- Manage the repeat prescribing reauthorisation process by reviewing requests for repeat prescriptions and medicines reaching review dates.
- Syncing patients' medication to reduce wastage, DMD corrections to facilitate EPS.
- Help improve the processes for monitoring and prescribing high-risk drugs (especially warfarin and methotrexate).
- Ensure all practices have a repeat prescribing policy and all staff are aware and are adhering to it.
- Improve the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of prescribing by liaising with GPs and/or other non-medical prescribers to action MM recommendations.
- Be a source of medicines information for all of the K&W practice teams and patients (e.g. around doses, side effects, adverse events, possible alternatives e.g. around out of stocks).
- Working with GPs to ensure medicines management audits, prescribing recommendations and targets are up-to-date.
- Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.
- Liaising with other pharmacy teams including CCG medicines management team to obtain practice-specific prescribing data and information on other local prescribing initiatives guidance.
- Encourage practices to work in line with the NWL integrated formulary.
- Encourage regular locums to work in line with locally agreed guidance.
- Empower other K&W Healthcare staff to contribute to good quality medicines management for member practices and care homes.
- Work with the general practice team to ensure that 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 programs available to general practice.
Maintaining an open-door policy throughout the day unless consulting with a patient. K&W & practice personnel can contact the clinical pharmacist for any medication advice and urgent issues that they feel are appropriate.
Person Specification
Qualifications
- A university degree Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) degree and a one year pre-registration training course in pharmacy completed. Accredited by General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC).
- Relevant A level and GCSE (grade A to C).
Experience
- Ideally 2 years of experience in General Practice.
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