Ascent Primary Care Network is looking to recruit to a vacant lead clinical pharmacist position, who has completed (or close to completion) the CPPE pathway. The role is a mix of practice-based pharmacist and supporting the PCN Medicines Management Team, therefore the working week is set up to cater for both services. Working most days for Asplands Medical Centre in Woburn Sands, there'll be one day a week dedicated to the PCN agenda when, with the rest of the Medicines Management Team, there is time to meet, develop and deliver the group programme of work.
Ascent PCN is a group of three practices: Asplands Medical Centre, Walnut Tree Health Centre and Fishermead Medical Centre, providing a unique mix across the spectrum of health needs and demographics. The close-knit Medicines Management Team have a member placed in each practice, key in supporting the individual practices with their daily capacity and delivery of services to the population they serve. But they also look to deliver the PCN agenda of proactive and preventative care. Ascent has a strong team of highly experienced medical educators with expertise in mentoring clinicians and we would love to continue that with another experienced senior onboard.
This is a friendly, supportive and welcoming place to work. Woburn Sands has a great high street for lunch breaks and the surgery is close to the M1 motorway, the Milton Keynes fast road networks and Woburn Sands train station, for an easy commute.
Main duties of the job
The successful applicant will work with the team daily to provide structured medication reviews, manage long-term conditions, oversee systems for safer prescribing (Eclipse and Medication monitoring), drug audits, medication optimisation, repeat authorisations, support the dispensary and clinical teams with medication queries, review medications on transfer of care, support the clinical teams in appropriate long-term prescribing choices, and be a link to community pharmacies to keep the team updated with stock issues etc. Appropriate clinical and admin time is rostered in the day to balance the need to deliver this mix of responsibilities. The post holder will provide clinical leadership to the Medicines Management Team, lead on policy and process development, quality improvement programmes, as well as manage the delivery of aspects of the Quality and Outcomes Framework, Prescribing Incentive Scheme and Investment and Impact Fund.
We'd love to continue our track record in training with an experienced applicant to take on mentoring junior pharmacy staff. We ideally are recruiting for an independent non-medical prescriber, however, we are open to supporting the right candidate to achieve this.
The Pharmacist role is pivotal to our PCN agenda of improving GP access and providing proactive health care. You should share a passion to deliver excellent service and an openness to embrace new models of care including group consultations.
About us
The PCN is well established with a variety of additional roles including a Physiotherapy team, Occupational Therapy, Social Prescribers and Health and Wellbeing Coaches and therapists. Our dynamic management team are proactive in developing the scope of roles further, building team capacity, embracing opportunities to trial new processes and recruit patients to beneficial pilot schemes and research programmes to improve our population's health. The PCN already has a track record of being a strong training centre and has ambitions to grow this further. Our emerging group consultation programme is supported by the wellbeing team and care coordinators, and we are currently working towards further expanding this programme into other long-term conditions including hypertension, weight and lipid management.
What We Offer:
Supportive Team: We value collaboration, learning, innovation and care.
Training: Our training capacity covers everything from daily duties to acquiring new qualifications, ensuring you are prepared to deliver outstanding care.
Career Growth: Whether you have years of experience or are just starting out in leadership, we're open to offering opportunities to develop your skills further.
Competitive Pay: A competitive salary based on your qualifications, experience, and scope of practice.
Pension: Access to NHS Pension or NEST pension.
Leave: Annual leave increasing with employment length and paid study leave.
Job responsibilities
A successful candidate would be a highly motivated individual, with a flexible attitude and the ability to adapt to new ways of working, and be able to demonstrate this in previous roles. They would need to be confident in their ability to work independently within their clinical scope of practice providing care for patients through careful history taking, clinical assessment, diagnosis, treatment and evaluation of their ongoing care. Completion of the CPPE already would be desirable although the PCN is supportive of those new to primary care requiring the complete the relevant training course.
The responsibilities will include but are not limited to:
1. Medication Reviews: Undertake clinical medication reviews in a variety of settings, face to face in practice, remotely, in care homes, for patients requiring medication review. Optimise medication in line with patient symptoms, preferences monitoring results and other indicators of control. Produce guidance and recommendations on ongoing prescribing and monitoring.
2. Long Term Conditions Reviews: Where appropriate review patients on long term conditions registers where medicine optimisation is required. Review the ongoing need for each medicine, review monitoring needs, empower patients to manage their own medications and get the best results. Make appropriate recommendations for the continuation, monitoring or stopping of medications as appropriate.
3. Multi-Disciplinary Team Working: Where appropriate attend PCN multi-disciplinary team meetings to give input to the optimisation of medicines in the frail, elderly or at-risk patients on the case load. Liaises with other stakeholders (patients, patients' representatives, clinical staff, community pharmacists, locality leads, nursing homes, secondary care providers) as needed for the collective benefit of patients.
4. Unplanned hospital Admissions: Review the patients at high risk of hospital admission using pre-prepared searches to identify those at risk through either polypharmacy or drugs associated with high risk of admission. Put in plans to change or reduce the prescribing of these medicines in high-risk patient groups.
5. Management of minor/self-limiting ailments: Within scope of practice manage a caseload of patients with minor or self-limiting ailments. Provide support to patients with questions, queries or concerns relating to their medications.
6. Management of medicines at discharge from hospital: Review and reconcile medications following discharge from hospitals, respite, intermediate or community care settings. Monitor systems to ensure continuity of supply in high-risk groups particularly those with medication compliance aids or in care homes.
7. Medicine Information for Primary Care Teams: Participate in clinical governance programmes and share medication related updates and alerts with GPs, and other clinical practice and network teams. Answer medication related queries and provide recommendations and solutions where appropriate.
8. Repeat Prescribing: Manage the repeat prescribing and re-authorisation process by reviewing processes for patient requests for repeat prescriptions. Reviewing medicines and concordance and flagging monitoring in place where required and review arranged where appropriate. Asplands and Woburn Surgeries have in-house Dispensaries and a team of dedicated dispensers to support this process.
9. Signposting: Signposting patients to allied services of healthcare professions where appropriate.
10. Service Development: Contribute pharmaceutical advice for the development and implementation of new services that have medicinal components (e.g. advice on treatment pathways and patient information leaflets).
11. Information Management: Interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision making. Co-ordinate and plan the care of patients with specific diseases to ensure that this is optimised and that the practice achieves QOF and DES targets. Coordinate efforts to ensure the practice improves its cost-effective prescribing, remains within budget and achieves CCG Prescribing Incentive Scheme targets.
12. Medicines Quality Improvement: Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the relevant practice team. Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.
13. Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations: Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economy's RAG list and make recommendations to GPs for medicines that should be prescribed by hospital doctors (red drugs) or subject to shared care (amber drugs). Assist practices in seeing and maintaining a practice formulary that is hosted on each practice's computer system. Auditing practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance. Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.
14. Education and Training: Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation. We are keen to continue providing training placements for trainee pharmacists.
15. Care Quality Commission: Work with general practice teams to ensure the practices are compliant with CQC standards where medicines are involved.
16. Public Health: To support public health campaigns. To provide specialist knowledge on all public health programmes available to the general public.
17. Professional Development: Work with your line manager to undertake continual personal and professional development, taking an active part in reviewing and developing the role and responsibilities. Adhere to organisational policies and procedures, including confidentiality, safeguarding, lone working, information governance, and health and safety. Work with your line manager to access regular clinical supervision to enable you to deal effectively with the difficult issues that people present. Review yearly progress and develop clear plans to achieve results within priorities set by others. Participate in the delivery of formal education programmes. Demonstrate an understanding of current educational policies relevant to working areas of practice and keep up to date with relevant clinical practice.
18. Research and Evaluation: Critically evaluate and review literature. Identify where there is a gap in the evidence base to support practice. Generate evidence suitable for presentations at practice and local level. Apply research evidence base into the workplace.
19. Health and Safety / Risk Management: Must always comply with the health and safety policies, in particular following safe working procedures and reporting incidents using the organisation's Incident Reporting Systems. Comply with the Data Protection Act (2018) and the Access to Health Records Act (1990).
20. Special Working Conditions: The post holder is required to travel independently between work sites and to attend meetings etc hosted by other agencies. The post holder may have contact with body fluids, i.e., wound exudates, urine etc while in clinical practice.
Work as part of the team to seek feedback, continually improve the service and contribute to business planning. Supervision of the Medicines Management Team, including 2 other Practice Pharmacists, Pharmacy Technician, Care Coordinator and Trainees. Undertake any tasks consistent with the level of the post and the scope of the role, ensuring that work is delivered in a timely and effective manner. Duties may vary from time to time, without changing the general character of the post or the level of responsibility. There may be occasional requirement to deliver an evening or Saturday clinic to support enhanced access for patients and target working age patients not able to attend during the week.
Person Specification
Qualifications
* Hold an undergraduate degree in pharmacy.
* Be registered with the General Pharmaceutical Council.
* Have completed or close to completion of the CPPE Pathway.
Experience
* Have previous experience working in Primary Care.
* Have line management or team leader experience.
* Have experience of writing and updating processes and policies.
* Audit and quality improvement examples.
* While we are ideally looking for a candidate that has an interest in developing skills in managing hypertension and lipids, we are open to other interests.
* Have experience in supervising student/pre-registration pharmacy training.
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.
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