Clinical Pharmacist

This is an exciting opportunity to join Cobham & Oxshott primary care network in Surrey working across both practice sites to develop and utilise the role of pharmacy within primary care to pro-actively help patients stay safe, well and out of hospital as well as supporting efforts to reduce the demands on general practice.

The post holder will help patients to get the best from their medicines by switching medications to agreed and approved protocols, improving repeat prescribing processes in General Practice, including online ordering using the NHS app, minimising clinical risk and aiming to reduce wasted medicines.

• To work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role to clinically assess and treat patients using extensive experience and in depth knowledge to be directly responsible for care and prescribing of defined cohort(s) of patients
• To deliver and develop pharmacy led medicines optimisation working with general practice and the wider multidisciplinary team, ensuring practice(s) remain up to date
• To lead and promote, support and facilitate medicines optimisation for specialist area in the wider medicines agenda ensuring best value, reduced harm and improved outcomes.
• To lead and deliver evaluation and quality improvement in order to ensure a high quality service and to further develop provision.
• To work to the principles of Medicines Optimisation and relevant up to date national guidelines and evidence base.
• To support the Prescribing Lead with the medicines agenda within the practice(s).

Ideal schedule Weds-Friday (hybrid of in person at Cobham Health Centre and working from home.)

Cobham & Oxshott Primary Care Network is a collaboration of two GP practices located in the Cobham and Oxshott area of Surrey, caring for a population of approximately 20,000 patients.

We are a friendly and inclusive team with prior experience of PCN working and have strong, established relationships with each other, our ICB and other local, external organisations with excellent support from our GP federation, GP Health Partners Ltd.

Main Responsibilities

• Work as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient facing role to clinically assess and treat patients using expert knowledge of medicines for specific disease areas.
• Provide pharmaceutical consultations to patients with long term conditions as an integral part of the multidisciplinary team.
• Provide proactive leadership on medicines and prescribing systems to the practice team, patients and their carers.
• Improve patient and carer understanding of, confidence in and compliance with their medication.
• Provide advice and answer medication related queries from patients and staff
• Organise and oversee the practices medicines optimisation systems including the repeat prescribing and medication review systems.
• Work with the GP Practices within the Primary Care Network to support them with implementation of the PCN DES and day-to-day general practice.
• Promote high quality, cost-effective prescribing in primary care, supporting the specifications within the PCN DES, including Structured Medication Reviews, Enhanced Health in Care Homes and other medicines optimisation tasks as determined by the Practice / PCN.
• Improve the quality and effectiveness of prescribing through clinical audit and education to improve performance against NICE standards, and clinical and prescribing guidance.
• Develop yourself and the role through participation in clinical supervision, training and service redesign activities.
• Contribute to a patient safety culture through reporting and investigation of medicines incidents and undertaking proactive measures to improve patient safety.
• Work with community pharmacists, hospital pharmacists, and other stakeholders in the medicines supply chain to improve patient experience and manage incidents.
• Deliver training, mentoring and guidance to other clinicians and staff on medicine issues.
• Respond to prescription requests from community patients, nursing/care home staff, pharmacy staff and GPs, processing them within recognised timescales (e.g. 48 hours for routine prescriptions and same day for urgent prescriptions). This can include re-routing prescriptions to out of hours pharmacies for same day delivery.
• Process monthly prescriptions for nursing/care homes, checking for changes and adherence/over-ordering issues.
• Use practice/PCN templates to record near patient monitoring for high risk drugs.
• Identify blood tests, recalls and reviews using established protocols and forward these to the appropriate clinician.
• Support and respond to medicines-related queries from medical and nursing colleagues and from patients and relatives via face to face, via phone or via email. Queries can include issues with interactions or ADRs, availability of stock, swallowing difficulties, cost-effectiveness, urgent requests or extra supplies.
• Review hospital discharge notifications and outpatient hospital letters and reconcile medication against…