Medicines Optimisation Pharmacist – Care Homes

We have an exciting opportunity for an experienced clinical pharmacist to join our Care Home Pharmacy team providing a medicines optimisation service to people living in residential care settings.

This role is for 30 hours per week

You will visit residents in their care home or nursing home to undertake person-centred structured medication reviews, review prescribing and make recommendations to GPs to improve patient outcomes focusing on quality and safety. In this role, you will work with multi-disciplinary teams to provide proactive support and education to empower care home staff to manage their residents’ medication safely and effectively.

To be considered for this role you will need to have experience working as a clinical pharmacist directly conducting medication reviews with patients with complex health needs and with a range of healthcare professionals. You should be able to work autonomously and manage your time effectively by prioritising your own workload and clinical issues. You will need to be resourceful, have the ability to make complex clinical decisions and be able to demonstrate the positive differences your interventions make to patient care and patient outcomes.

We have a well-established Care Home Pharmacy Team of seven pharmacists from a variety of backgrounds to support you and provide training. Ideally, you will be an Independent Prescriber or willing to work towards this qualification.

You will be required to travel between care homes and GP surgeries and must hold a full drivers licence with access to own transport. The office base is Fort Southwick, Fareham with an element of home working.

We offer excellent employment opportunities to new and existing staff. We aim to be a model employer by embedding best HR practice and to support new ways of working.

We pride ourselves on offering good working conditions, job security, lifelong learning, fair pay and benefits, staff involvement and a balance between work and personal life.

We enjoy a forward thinking and innovative culture and our vision is to have healthy people, living healthy lives in healthy communities. We understand the only way to deliver this is to have the right people with the right skills.

Here is a summary of some of the benefits and services which are on offer to staff:

• 27 days paid minimum holiday and bank holiday entitlement
• NHS pension scheme
• Sick pay policy
• Occupational health services including staff counselling services
• Flexible working and family friendly policies
• Flexible retirement and retirement vouchers
• Health Service Discounts – offers for stores, travel, equipment etc.

Successful candidates will be subject to a six-month probationary period.

• To promote high quality, safe and cost effective prescribing informed where possible by evidence based practice, national guidance e.g. NICE. To ensure prescribing conforms to relevant legislation.
• Responsible for ensuring the development and delivery of the Medicines Optimisation agenda in care homes and liaising with partners and other stakeholders on a regular basis. Ensuring that relevant activity and outcome data is recorded and reported in a timely fashion.
• To undertake clinical medical reviews to reduce unnecessary polypharmacy.
• To liaise with Medicines Optimisation colleagues providing GP prescribing support to ICB GP practices.
• To take a lead around medicines optimisation clinical governance issues relating to the care homes including liaising with relevant staff and monitoring any resulting action plans.
• To develop strong working relationships with wider stakeholders and partners e.g. community pharmacists, local authority, commissioners and clinical governance leads.
• Lead locally on cost-effective prescribing for the care homes ensuring best use of the prescribing budget.
• Contribute to the production of incentive scheme audits which relate to care home