Overview

This page is designed to provide an overview of your typical daily duties. Please note that there may be some site variations based on room availability, staffing levels, clinical meetings, and / or PLTs.

Daily Schedule

Our part-time team members complete the daily schedule up to 1:45 pm.

Regular Duties

Processing Patient Prescription Requests

Prescription requests include patients repeatable medication, requests for new, acute or past medication, and may also involve assessing the safety of restarting a medication. We should be screening these requests for safety, appropriateness as well as the needs of the individual patient.

For further guidance please refer your query to:

• Practice Pharmacist at your site
• Pharmacy Lead
• Teams channel/chat “Prescription Queries” or “Pharmacists & Technician Chat Group”

1️⃣ Medicines Management

This is a part of the EMIS Workflow tool which allows you to check prescription requests that are coming from:

• NHS patient access app
• Patients’ nominated pharmacy

2️⃣ Tasks

Review and action any requests and prescription queries that have been sent from in-house clinicians or frontline team via EMIS Workflow Manager → Tasks.

Communication from frontline teams will include urgent requests (e.g., for housebound or vulnerable patients where it is not possible for the patient to email / use NHS app / attend pharmacy themselves).

Communicate any actions taken to call handlers, or clinicians to ensure continuity in our care.

3️⃣ Emails

Access 📧Generic Surgery Inbox to review and action:

• repeat requests from pharmacies
• clinical letters / documents
• any other patient / clinician requests

4️⃣ Catch-up with Practice Pharmacist

This should ideally be happening daily either in person or via Teams.

The aim of this would be to raise any in-house issues, discuss the need for any extra support (where needed), discuss daily queries, or any patients that may need to be added to the weekly clinical meeting for discussion.

5️⃣ Clinical Letters

These letters are sent via EMIS Workflow Manager → Documents or via Tasks/Emails. The source will often be the patient’s specialist or following their discharge from hospital. There may also be letters on the local record that have not yet been received by the practice which we may need to refer to.

The letters will detail any medication changes that have been made or advised. You must ensure any complex letters (e.g., discharge summaries with multiple drug changes, high-risk patients with co-morbidities) are screened by Practice Pharmacist. Please refer to 📥Processing Medication Letters for more info.

6️⃣ Medicine Optimisation Plan (MOP)

The Medicines Optimisation Plan is updated each year and details the requirements and advice from the local medicines management team. We are responsible as a primary care pharmacy team to ensure safe, appropriate and cost-effective prescribing.

Our role is to support the practice and the local borough to ensure efficient medicines optimisation processes are being managed. This action will include:

• Working in line with the most up to date/current MOP
• Identifying any prescription requests for medications that are not in line with MOP, and appropriately switching medication, flagging to pharmacist or signposting patient to local, available services
• Run searches on EMIS reporting (which will be set up) and reviewing patients on these lists e.g. patients on self-care medications and making appropriate switches as outlined under South East London guidance

7️⃣ Clinical Duties

• Support drug monitoring, in line with SEL protocols / NICE / BNF for high-risk medications. This will also include running searches in EMIS Reporting for high-risk drug monitoring to ensure the highest standard of patient safety across our practices.
• Clinical audits: this may include running searches in EMIS Reporting and reviewing patients who may require further care with support from practice pharmacist and pharmacy lead.
• Communicate with pharmacies, clinicians and patients where necessary for advice / to address any concerns
• Use SEL IMOC and SEL formulary to check the appropriateness of prescription requests
• Dealing with national drug shortages/alerts and contacting patients with advice from pharmacists/pharmacy lead.
• To raise concerns with patients’ medication (e.g., overuse / compliance issue with pharmacist)

8️⃣ Non-Clinical Duties

• Support promotion and maintenance of Electronic Repeat Dispensing (eRD) and online ordering
• Attend monthly pharmacy meetings and any relevant MOP meetings