Pharmacy Services

What is a Clinical Pharmacist?

A Clinical Pharmacist has all the equivalent training needed by a pharmacist you might see in a chemist but they have developed extra skills and undergone further training to enable them to work in Primary Care and help you manage your medicines and health better. This is a relatively new role to our practices so we are working together to help shape the service that will benefit everyone.

What is a Pharmacy Technician?

A Pharmacy Technician helps to support the Clinical Pharmacists to ensure the delivery of safe, effective and efficient systems for repeat prescribing, medicines optimisation, reducing medicines waste and maximising patient outcomes.

When will you see us?

You may be referred to see one of our team by a nurse, or GP – or you may see them first. We call this triage. They are there to help your surgery teams and specialise in minor complaints, so they would be able to see you for things like coughs, colds, diarrhoea, ear ache, chicken pox, skin conditions or minor infections.  They can signpost you to the right over the counter medicine to buy, or – if the condition requires it and it is recommended to prescribe, they can write a prescription, or refer you onward to a GP.

Arranging your prescription queries

Together with the surgery team, they help monitor requests for repeat prescriptions, checking you’ve had the correct blood tests completed, issuing and helping to synchronise your medicines so that the pharmacy can fulfil your prescription request with ease.

Reviewing medicines

If you have been taking medicines for a long time, you may see a clinical pharmacist periodically.  We can review your medicines together, carry out health and blood pressure checks, and have time to talk together about the things that are important to you about your health and medicines.  If we have any apprehensions we can’t resolve – we’ll pass those to your doctor.

After hospital discharge

If your medicines have been started, or changed, in hospital, our Pharmacy team might talk to you to explain these changes, and make sure you understand how your new medicines will work for you.  They’ll be helping ensure that the information that comes from the hospital, gets transported to your GP records correctly, and that your new prescriptions are ready to go to the your preferred pharmacy when you need them.

Long term conditions

Our Clinical Pharmacists can help you to manage your long term conditions too.  If you have a condition such as asthma, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis or high blood pressure they can discuss your medicines and make sure they are working optimally for you.  They can also refresh you on things that you may have forgotten like how to use your inhaler or getting the best from your glucose monitor, talk about doses and timings, side effects and what you can expect.  All those things that you were thinking that you didn’t want to bother your doctor with, or you forgot to ask in your usual appointment.