Clinical Pharmacy

About the service

Our PCN pharmacists are highly skilled healthcare professionals with expert knowledge of medication, who are passionate about ensuring that patients are taking medication that is appropriate, safe and effective for them. Our pharmacists work closely with the multidisciplinary teams across all of the surgeries in Rushcliffe and our care homes team, to provide clinical expertise.
Role;

• Medicines management in practice
• Management of long-term conditions through regular clinics
• Advice on systems for safer prescribing
• Answer patient queries regarding their medication
• Support for the wider clinical team with medication queries
• Provide structured medication reviews (SMRs) to patients; with long term conditions, in care homes, taking 10 or more medicines, with severe frailty and those using potentially addictive pain medicines. SMRs aim to support patients to get the best from their medicines, reduce waste and promote self-care.
• Clinical governance in practice
• Work closely with our PCN pharmacy technician colleagues

Here at Rushcliffe PCN, we pride ourselves on our large, friendly, supportive and proactive pharmacy team. We have excellent, robust clinical governance procedures in place with oversight from our lead pharmacist and lead GP. Monthly clinical supervision sessions, team meetings and clinical training sessions are all well established and we also have excellent admin and HR support from the Partner’s Health team. We are also committed to supporting the professional growth and development of our team through the clinical pharmacists in general practice pathway and beyond to advanced practice level.

Rebecca graduated from Nottingham University in 1999 and has since had a varied career in community pharmacy, general practice and pharmacy education. She joined Partner’s Health in 2020 to manage and lead our pharmacy team, which she balances alongside her clinical work at Radcliffe on Trent Health Centre and East Bridgford Medical Centre. She’s passionate about seeing the role of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians in general practice develop and really enjoys teaching and mentoring the growing team.

Diploma in Clinical Pharmacy Practice (2007)
Independent Prescriber (2016)
MSc In Advanced Practice (2022)

Based at East Bridgford Medical Centre and Radcliffe-on-Trent Health Centre

Pharmacy Tecnicians

Pharmacy Technicians

Pharmacy technicians play an important role within general practice complementing clinical pharmacists, community pharmacy, GPs and other members of the PCN multi-disciplinary team. Pharmacy technicians are different to clinical pharmacists as they are not able to prescribe or make clinical decisions, instead working under supervision to ensure effective and efficient use of medicines. Pharmacy technicians’ core role is to lead improvements to maximise safe, cost effective best practice in prescribing to improve the quality of patient care.
Role:

• Contribute to improving patient care and help patients get the best from their medicines
• Patient safety audits
• On the day queries - synchronising patient’s medication on repeat, dealing with out of stock medication
• Following up patients who have recently been discharged from hospital, intermediate care and into care homes.
• Discharge summary / letters from hospital – identifying and rectifying unexplained changes and working with patients and liaising with community pharmacy to ensure patients receive the medicines they need.
• Contacting patients post discharge to make them aware of changes to their medication if not already been informed by hospital, answering any questions in regards to the letter, booking patient in for bloods and referring/ signposting onto other services when required.
• 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).
• Medication reviews

Qualified in 2008 in Edinburgh
PCN pharmacy technician and previously worked at both Edinburgh Royal infirmary and Derby Royal Hospital. Cara has a total of 14 years experience working in hospital.
Cara joined PartnersHealth in October 2020 and her role in primary care is working alongside the GPs, pharmacists and other members of the primary care network by contributing and helping to improve patient care and support medicines optimisation

Based at Village Health Group and The Gamston Medical Centre

Qualified in 2003 and spent 8 years working at the Nottingham City Hospital before moving over to the Primary Care Trust in 2008. From 2011 Katerina worked in the Nottingham Citycare medicines management team conducting compliance reviews for patients and training care homes on safe medicines administration.

Katerina joined Partners Health in September 2021 and is looking forward to working with the Pharmacists and GPs to help patients safely manage their medicines.

Based at Orchard Surgery and Village Health Group