My career timeline before I became a practice pharmacist is predominantly made up of hospital experience (Senior MI Pharmacist, at Northwick Park Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital), with a splash of community (Sainsburys Pharmacy manager) and prison sector exposure (HMP The Mount).

Having worked for 3 years across 13 GP practices, my role developed and consisted of: supporting other clinical pharmacists, running frailty and long-term condition clinics as well as polypharmacy medication review clinics, repeat prescriptions, clinical post, LES/DES medicines management targets and audits, streamlining processes and change management, telephone triage, medicines enquiries within the practice for other HCPs, interpreting pathology

I worked as a Band 8a Senior GP Pharmacist initially in 1 surgery alongside an entry-level pharmacist with a population of 9,000 patients.

I moved then to work across 10 practices for Islington GP Federation and CCG over a 1 year to pilot the GP practice pharmacist role to give them a taster of the role. After this, I worked full time across GP surgeries in Islington and Tower Hamlets whilst being involved in training -see below!

To educate and train other practice pharmacists and aspiring practice pharmacists to upskill themselves to perform at the top of their skillset within the general practice setting, in a safe and effective manner. This will ultimately enable us to achieve fantastic patient outcomes and improve the quality of care that we give to our patients.

I focussed on showing my impact on the outcomes achieved to the GPs by:

• showcasing how I reduced their workload as well as other healthcare professionals at the surgery (e.g. streamlined repeat prescription and clinical post processes, thereby saving them 4 hours of admin time each day),
• saved GP time allowing them to see more complex patients (e.g. 60 extra patients seen by GPs each week by releasing their prescription and post admin time)
• added value by offering additional appointment to patients to see me for their medication related issues, medication reviews and LTC management (e.g. offering an additional 28 pharmacist appointments each week)
• providing medicines information to the healthcare professionals working in the surgery and improving their prescribing habits (e.g. improvement in their LES/DES targets and meeting cost effective prescribing switches)

I am thrilled to be in this role working in such an exciting space innovating & supporting GP Pharmacists across the country. Skills-wise I am working on further developing my training, development, coaching and leadership skills with the support from the Soar Beyond team. I am also working on helping GP Pharmacists to do the same!

To be honest, I think as pharmacists, we fixate on the technical and clinical skills (which are of course critical) but we really don’t invest enough time developing our so-called ‘soft skills’. What I mean by this is that the main challenges in a pressurised, under-resourced general practice environment are much more about the ability/ discipline to get off the ever-rotating hamster wheel, think about what we are trying to achieve, what the practice needs and how we can go about helping them to deliver. We have generally never been trained to think about how to influence a system change (no matter how big or small), how to negotiate with challenging stakeholders, the importance of creating dissatisfaction to drive change as well as initiating, managing and evaluating projects/ initiatives. It’s exactly these sort of skills that the i2i Network is developing and supporting general practice pharmacists with, using simplified & structured methodologies brought in from other areas of industry.

The i2i stands for insight 2 implementation and it really does what it says on the tin. The workshops develop your insight & knowledge but have a clear implementation-focus including change management tools etc. Before joining, I hadn’t really appreciated that as a free member, you get access to the free implementation resources which are invaluable, and really enable you to put your learning into practice straight after you have attended a training event- something I have never seen before from a training provider. I had never attended a workshop before I got the job, but I wished I had as it would have helped me massively! I love that the workshops also have such a big focus on networking and sharing best practice- something we need as we so often work in isolation in general practice!

There is no right or wrong career path in pharmacy, and it is OK to try out different roles to gain experience and develop and acquire new skills. You never know what opportunities may come your way if you work hard, work rigorously, and are passionate about what you do! The fact that I am in such an exciting role for Soar Beyond influencing such a cutting-edge part of the profession is hopefully testament to that!