Oct 2022- Oct 2023 West Hertfordshire hospitals
Locum Clinical Pharmacist

Working with a dedicated team to ensure prescriptions and clinical pharmacy practices are safe, cost-effective, and fully legal.
Utilising my years of experience to helping healthcare professionals and patients by providing a vast outpatient & inpatient pharmacy service
Ensuring exemplary service standards and quality of information at all times.
Working closely with homecare and cancer services to provide appropriate and safe services.

Dec 2020 – June 2022 Cello Health
Publishing Manager

Acting as a key point of contact between the clients, consulting and creative teams to ensure stakeholders achieve their deliverables in a timely manner.
Lead on marketing projects to provide clients with internal communications, external advertising campaigns and launch strategies for top tier pharmaceutical companies in order to position their product in the current market
Understanding our clients’ needs and ensuring we produce the deliverables as the client expects.
Dealing with missed deadline and providing solutions to ensure the client gets the most positive outcomes.
Utilise sales techniques to promote and push the services we provide to enhance client’s overall experience.

Aug 2019 – Dec 2020 Blue Latitude Health
Account Executive

Acting as a key point of contact between the clients, consulting and creative teams to ensure stakeholders achieve their deliverables in a timely manner.
Lead on marketing projects to provide clients with internal communications, external advertising campaigns and launch strategies for top tier pharma companies in order to position their product in the current market.
Ensured all deliverables are reviewed and abides by the ABPI code to make sure the clients and affiliated European markets get accurate documents based on a medical, legal and regulatory review.
Delivered projects by project managing, briefing and co-ordinating internal and external stakeholders to write, design and review content to meet the client’s brief and hard deadlines.
Co-ordinated and delivered training for graduate scientists on the life of an account executive at the Kings College of London and the Pharmaceutical Marketing Society.
Project managed on producing pitch content with other agency staff with the aim of securing new business.

No

I have worked with TLA in the past and they have been incredibly helpful and trustworthy.

It my latest role before maternity leave, I was working in the dispensary where there is always a high volume of work. I had someone from the homecare team calling enquiring about homecare prescriptions that were needed to be clinically screened by a pharmacist as soon as possible as they have quite a few to process before the end of the day.

When I looked for the homecare prescriptions in the dispensary there were about 100+ prescriptions waiting to be screened and processed. With the high volume of TTAs, inpatient and outpatient prescriptions to be processed there was no way we could tackle all the homecare prescriptions before the end of the day. So I called the team back and asked them which prescriptions were urgent. They called out about 25 scripts. I delegated my work for about 30/40 minuted so I could screen these prescriptions and went back to doing my own work once they were screened and processed.

In order to prevent the build up of homecare prescriptions in the future, I split the prescriptions up between three pharmacists and asked them to tackle as many as possible for the rest of the week in the first half hour of the morning as it is usually quiet.

By the end of the week we worked through all of them, preventing delay. I took it upon myself to take charge of homecare prescriptions and divide the work up every week, so they are not forgotten especially when the volume of work is always high in the dispensary.

Medicines act 1968 helps to monitor medications for the consumption of humans and animals. It aids with the distribution and licensing of all medication in the UK to ensure a safe relationship between patient and medication. In pharmacy specific the medicines act helps to categorise medication into POMs, Ps and GSL.

I am currently not a prescriber so I would have to outright refuse, however if i was an IP I would have to refuse the person asking me to prescribe a medication, until I have clarified what the patient was in for and what their needs were. I would have to check their notes and history before blindly prescribing something. It is also very important to have clear documentation. The reasons for prescribing, who you spoke to, their bleep number, their job role etc. This will leave an audit trail to ensure patient safety.

I would have to take a step back and understand and identify what has happened and the level of harm. First and foremost I would ensure the patient or person affected has been spoken to. It is important to review my notes and actions and reflect on my practice. Reflecting could mean seeking advice from other colleagues on how the situation could have been handled differently. Where appropriate I would report the incident on the LFPSE, increasing transparency in the work place. It would be a good time to put an action plan in place and implement changes, then to identify my learning needs and undergo further training if necessary via internal or external providers.

The Patient Safety Incident Response framework (PSIRF) is a great tool for all NHS workers to follow when a patient safety incident has occurred. Resources should be available to help NHS staff learn and improve upon their practices.

Clinical governance helps to ensure quality care to the highest of standards, where patients are treated with the utmost dignity. It helps keep NHS accountable and allows the trust to identify where improvement is required. Clinical governance helps put processes in place for education and training, risk management, staff management and more.

A patient’s husband came to collect an outpatient medication for his wife at the dispensary hatch. The patient’s husband mentioned that “the clinic has told me the medication is ready” please could I collect it now.

The pharmacist assistant took the patient’s details so I the pharmacist could look up if the prescription had come through electronically and clinically screen it. When I checked Cerna nothing had come through so asked the assistant to tell the patient that we needed to wait a few minutes for the prescription to come through as sometimes there can be a system delay.

The current waiting time for outpatient prescriptions was 30 minutes. He was not happy due to parking charges at the hospital and started shouting at the pharmacist assistant at the hatch. I could hear the commotion and went to help , I asked the patient to calm down and clearly communicated to the patient what was going on and that we needed to contact the clinic his wife had just attended. All this may take a little time.

The couple lived far away from the hospital and they have been in and out of the hospital for 3 weeks. It was clearly getting too much for him and his wife (who has now joined him) and so I asked them to take a seat whilst I contact the clinic to find out why there was a delay. The clinic had forgotten to send the prescriptions and the Dr was with another patient so the wait might be longer than usual.

At this point I used my initiative and asked the nurse to tell me what was prescribed for the patient so I could check if we had it in stock, preventing further delay. It turns out the medication that was going to be prescribed was not in stock anyway. I could see that this prescription was going to take a while to complete as we still needed to order the medication in. I explained the situation to the patient and asked if they were happy to collect the medication tomorrow from their local hospital (which was part of the same trust).

Once the prescription and medication were in the pharmacy department, we could courier it to the hospital and call the patient when it was ready to collect. This could be collected at leisure. The husband calmed down and was happy to not wait and collect it locally. It didn’t feel right to further distress a patient and her husband who seemed visibility overwhelmed.