Fixed-term (9-12 months, maternity cover)
Full-time (option to compress hours into 4 days)
Hybrid working
Start date: August–September
Salary based on experience
- Trumpington Street Medical Practice
- Newnham Walk Surgery
- Lensfield Medical Practice
Job Summary
The senior clinical pharmacist will work across the CAM Medical Primary Care Network area in the pharmacy team. Work undertaken at the practices will be determined according to their existing and developing systems and will include some or all of the responsibilities noted below:
- Medication Review and Optimisation
- Care Home Medication Reviews
- Long Term Condition Clinics
- Medicines Reconciliation and processing discharge letter
- Unplanned Admission Prevention
- Medicines Information / Education
- Prescribing Systems and Policies
- Medicines safety
- Liaison with community and hospital pharmacies
- Running reports and audits
- Any other duties as reasonably required.
Job Description
- Respond to pharmacy queries to include clarifying doses and/or products and give appropriate alternatives when availability issues occur.
- Discuss medication issues with patients as needed and appropriate by telephone, e.g. adverse effects/interactions, overdose/inadvertent ingestion, OTC remedies, queries from practice dispensary, queries from care homes.
- Discuss specific patient and prescribing issues (e.g. complicated regimes/polypharmacy, compliance difficulties, multiple adverse effects, medication reduction regimes) with other clinicians as necessary
Face to face and video consultations with patients may include:
- Discuss medication issues as needed and as appropriate
- Carry out medication review
- Review and continue repeat medications for new patients who have just registered with the practice, and suggest GP medication review where appropriate.
- Support GPs with management of care home residents
- Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients with multi-morbidity and poly-pharmacy and implement own prescribing changes (if an independent prescriber) and order relevant monitoring tests
- Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.
According to experience and training undertake chronic disease reviews and medicine optimisation according to practice guidelines:
- Hypertension (lifestyle advice and medication initiation and optimisation)
- Diabetes (joint clinic with practice nurse, with referral to GP/community diabetes nurse specialist/secondary care diabetes advice line)
- CHD (medicines optimisation, with referral to GP where necessary)
- Asthma and COPD (medicines optimisation, with referral to GP where necessary)
- Chronic pain management (responding to patient or GP requests for review)
- Review secondary care requests for new medication (as communicated by discharge summaries, outpatient letters, etc.), raise any queries with relevant GP and discuss how to respond when inappropriate prescribing requests arise.
- Deal with anticoagulant start/stop requests from secondary care.
- Devise and implement practice searches to identify cohorts of patients most likely to be at risk of an unplanned admission and readmissions from polypharmacy
- Work with practice team to put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high-risk patient groups.
- Monitor and inform colleagues as relevant about ongoing prescribing issues, e.g. new guidelines (national and local), new products being asked for by secondary care, manufacturing and supply problems, new prescribing restrictions or contraindications, and individual and systematic errors made by colleagues
- Advise on cost effective prescribing and prescribing budget issues
- Assist in identifying patients in need of medication review and developing systems to meet this need
- Work with the GPs and the practice teams to develop and implement safe and efficient prescribing policies and strategies for CAM Medical Primary Care Network to maximise efficiency and reduce wastage
- Suggest and design audits in relation to prescribing targets, implementation of locality policies and the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF)
- Work with the GPs and practice managers on delivering targets for the local prescribing quality schemes
- Monitor CAM Medical Primary Care Network’s prescribing performance and advise on changes to practice prescribing as appropriate
- Oversight and audit of high risk drug monitoring
- Identify national and local policy and guidance that affects patient safety through the use of medicines, including MHRA alerts, product withdrawals and emerging evidence from clinical trials
- Support integration of CAM Medical Primary Care Network within community and hospital pharmacies and proactively manage patients at risk of medicine related problems on discharge, to provide continuity of care
- In the domain of Medicines Quality Improvement, conduct clinical audits of prescribing in designated areas as directed by the clinical lead and/or GPs
- Provide feedback on the findings
- Collaborate with the practice team to implement necessary changes.
Undertake any other appropriate duties as may reasonably be required from time to time.
Special working conditions
To be prepared to work flexibly if required and at different locations across the primary care network. Part of this role can be done remotely.
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 / consortium 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-judgmental and respects their circumstances, feelings priorities and rights.
Job Type: Full-time
Benefits:
Application question(s):
- Have you completed CPPE training?
Experience:
- SystmOne: 1 year (preferred)
- primary care: 1 year (required)
Licence/Certification:
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Cambridge CB2 1EH
