Clinical Pharmacist

Job description Job responsibilities Primary Duties and Areas of Responsibility

Patient facing Long-term condition Clinics

See patients with single or multiple medical problems where medicine optimisation is required (e.g. COPD, asthma). Review the on-going need for each medicine, a review of monitoring needs and an opportunity to support patients with their medicines taking ensuring they get the best use of their medicines (i.e. medicines optimisation). Make appropriate recommendations to GPs for medicine improvement.

Patient facing Clinical medication reviews

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for nurses and/or GP on prescribing and monitoring.

Patient facing care home medication reviews

Undertake clinical medication reviews with patients and produce recommendations for the GPs on prescribing and monitoring. Work with care home staff to improve safety of medicines ordering and administration.

Patient facing medicines support

Provide patient facing clinics for those with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines in the practice.

Telephone medicines support

Provide a telephone help line for patients with questions, queries and concerns about their medicines.

Medicine information to practice staff and patients

Answers relevant medicine-related enquiries from GPs, other practice staff, other healthcare teams (e.g. community pharmacy) and patients with queries about medicines. Suggesting and recommending solutions. Unplanned hospital admissions

Review the use of medicines most commonly associated with unplanned hospital admissions and re-admissions through audit and individual patient reviews. Put in place changes to reduce the prescribing of these medicines to high risk patient groups.

Management of medicines at discharge from hospital

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).

Repeat prescribing Manage the repeat prescribing re-authorisation process by reviewing patient requests for repeat prescriptions and reviewing medicines reaching review dates and flagging up those needing a review. Ensure patients have appropriate monitoring tests in place when required.

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).

Information management

Analyse, interpret and present medicines data to highlight issues and risks to support decision making.

Medicines quality improvement

Undertake clinical audits of prescribing in areas directed by the GPs, feedback the results and implement changes in conjunction with the practice team.

Medicines safety

Implement changes to medicines that result from MHRA alerts, product withdrawal and other local and national guidance.

Implementation of local and national guidelines and formulary recommendations

Monitor practice prescribing against the local health economies 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 the practices computer system. Auditing practices compliance against NICE technology assessment guidance. Provide newsletters or bulletins on important prescribing messages.

Education and Training

Provide education and training to primary healthcare team on therapeutics and medicines optimisation.

Care Quality Commission

Work with the general practice team to ensure 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 programmes available to the general public.