Advanced Clinical Pharmacist - Bone Marrow Transplant

Advanced Clinical Pharmacist - Bone Marrow Transplant

An exciting opportunity has arisen to lead the Bone Marrow Transplant portfolio as an Advanced Clinical Pharmacist within Haematology at Leeds Teaching Hospitals.

As a tertiary specialist centre for haematology patients in the region, we provide cutting-edge therapies for patients with various haematological malignancies including Bone Marrow Transplant, CAR-T treatment, and intensive chemotherapy.

The post holder would be working as part of a specialist MDT at a large transplant centre ensuring that we continue to adhere to international JACIE standards.

We are looking for someone who is able to manage a dynamic and changing workload with the post holder expected to utilise skills around medicines governance, finance, and clinical trials.

In addition, the successful candidate would be responsible for the validation of Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) and inputting to pharmaceutical care on our specialist inpatient wards. Any additional training requirements would be covered using our structured SACT verification training programme.

Main duties of the job

• Provide an advanced clinical pharmacy service to our inpatient wards including those receiving inpatient Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT)
• Attend the regular bone marrow transplant ward round providing specialist pharmaceutical advice to patients undergoing stem cell transplantation
• Validation of SACT across a range of sub-specialities
• Support the review and setup of new clinical trials added to the haematology portfolio as well as management of amendments to existing ones.
• Utilisation of the ChemoCare prescribing system to setup both trial and non-trial treatment templates for use in the Leeds Cancer Centre
• Attendance at speciality governance meetings within the bone marrow transplant portfolio.
• Support the implementation of new anti-cancer treatments within the post holder's designated area of practice
• Support Drug & Therapeutics processes for individual and cohort applications for the unlicensed use of medicines
• Undertake finance reporting to support the best value for medicines agenda
• Provide training and supervision to colleagues in the cancer team and across pharmacy
• Supervise and line manage a junior pharmacist within the cancer services pharmacy team

About us

The haematology pharmacy team works together on a daily basis to ensure that some of our most complex and challenging treatments within Leeds Teaching Hospitals are delivered safely, efficiently, and in a patient-centered manner. Our team is made up of some highly experienced pharmacists who have strong working relationships with the wider multi-disciplinary team.

Any new starter to the team receives a thorough induction drawing on the years of experience possessed by our pharmacists and technicians within various specialist fields. We have a strong ethos of workforce development. We strive to ensure that all members of the team are able to access development opportunities not solely limited to clinical work as well as the facilitation of regular team-based clinical education sessions.

Weekly huddles ensure all team members are supported and workloads are appropriately managed whilst at the same time sharing learning and best practice.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals is committed to our process of redeploying 'at risk' members of our existing workforce to new roles. As such, all our job adverts are subject to this policy and we reserve the right to close, delay or remove adverts while this process is completed. If you do experience a delay in the shortlisting stage of the recruitment cycle, please bear with us while this process is completed, and contact the named contact if you have any questions.

Job responsibilities

Clinical

• Lead the highly specialised clinical pharmacy service to patients and the multidisciplinary team within a given clinical speciality.
• Support the Trust's Prescribing Standards and challenge practice where prescribers have not adhered to the Medicines Code.
• Demonstrate the ability to provide safe, clinically effective, and cost-effective use of medicines in accordance with Trust policy, standard operating procedures, and medicine legislation. This will include individual prescription review to optimise therapy, advising on dosage and side effects and on safe administration of medicines. The post holder is expected to determine how the outcomes are best achieved in specific circumstances.
• Pharmacists who are registered as prescribers will, with the agreement of the clinical director of the speciality, prescribe within their level of competence, to support patient care.
• Plan, manage, monitor, and review individual patient care plans.
• Participate in consultant ward rounds and multi-disciplinary team meetings.
• Manage difficult and ambiguous problems, often when information is limited.
• Undertake risk management, including investigating clinical incidents in the clinical area and ensuring compliance with medicine legislation.
• The post holder will be expected to identify, where necessary, areas that require service changes and develop a strategy to carry out the change through consultation with senior colleagues within and outside the pharmacy.
• Manage the introduction of new drugs, including unlicensed drugs, into the clinical speciality.
• Manage the clinical pharmacist input into clinical trials.
• Develop and update policies for the safe, effective, and economic use of medicines through discussion with medical and nursing staff.
• Communication with Primary Care about medicines policies or guidelines specific for their area of practice.

Management

• Monitor and interpret expenditure on medicines within own clinical speciality. Provide the Directorate with regular reports to assist in the management of the drug budget.
• Attend the monthly Clinical Speciality Management meetings to advise on medicine use and financial implications.
• Horizon scan for new drugs and advise the clinical speciality meetings on the financial implications.
• Co-ordinate Medicines Use Savings Projects.
• Review prescribing data from out-patient clinics.
• Contribution to financial initiatives.
• Write or respond to business cases for service development to secure additional funding.
• Responsible for day-to-day supervision/management of specialist clinical pharmacists in clinical speciality (some staff).

Research and Education

• Occasionally participate in research and development within clinical speciality.
• Undertake own research/audit within clinical speciality.
• Supervise, teach, and assess junior pharmacy staff completing training modules within the clinical area. This input varies, mostly based on the experience of the post holder, and will typically include:
• Acting as a trainer to pre-registration and junior pharmacists in their area of specialist practice.
• Being a named tutor for a pre-registration and/or diploma pharmacist.
• Lecturing on clinical issues relevant to the specialty, as part of the pre-registration training program, the clinical diploma, and any other in-service training.
• The post holder is also expected to participate in the training of other clinical professionals within their specialist area as requested.
• Develop the role of a specialist pharmacist through national links.

Other

• Provide a service commitment, typically a four-hour session to a specific area within the pharmacy department e.g. dispensary, aseptics, or medicines information.
• Perform other duties as directed by manager.
• Participate in the weekend service and where contracted, the emergency duty service.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Registrant of the GPhC
• Postgraduate diploma in clinical pharmacy or equivalent
• Non-medical prescriber status

Experience

• Understanding and appreciation of local and national pharmaceutical and clinical strategies.
• Advanced clinical pharmacy knowledge in a demonstrated area of practice.
• Understanding of NHS/government policy and its applications.
• Ability to demonstrate foundation level competencies in all domains of the Advanced to Consultant Level Framework (ACLF).

Skills & behaviours

• Team player.
• Able to work under own initiative.
• Be highly adaptive to changing circumstances and situations.
• Highly developed influencing and negotiating skills.
• Be able to plan effectively both own workload and that of specialist team.

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.