Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust strives to deliver an outstanding patient centred pharmacy service. As experts in medicines, our focus is to ensure safe, timely, and effective use of medicines. Our highly trained team of pharmacy staff are constantly seeking to develop new and improved ways of working to allow us to support the Trust in delivering high quality care.
The pharmacy service has strong links to primary care and other providers of NHS services across the region. We are core members of the joint formulary and area prescribing committees in Nottinghamshire.
We have a team of around 100 people including pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacy assistants, and administration staff providing a range of services to patients and the Trust from supplying medicines to wards and clinics, to providing clinical input and guidance to medical teams within the Trust.
The Trust is committed to ensuring the optimal use of medicines.
Our pharmacy services include:
Dispensary, procurement, distribution, and stores
Most of our medicines supply to patients, wards, clinics, and departments is from our newly refurbished dispesnary at the Wells Road site. The dispensary operations at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provide a medicines supply service to approximately 500 beds (across multiple locations) and a number of outpatient services, including day patients and community-based patients across Nottinghamshire. The current pharmacy transformation program has included a redesign of the dispensary and pharmacy stores which include a new semi-automated dispensing robot.
Our ward, clinic, and community teams stock supplies are provided by our pharmacy stores and the procurement team. They ensure stock medicines are properly managed and work closely with teams to facilitate urgent requests.
Ward based medicines management
Our teams of ward-based pharmacy technicians and pharmacists work together to deliver medicines optimisation support to ensure safe and effective medicines treatments to patients at ward level. Our teams work throughout the Trust and are embedded in the General Health, Mental Health, Offender Health, and Secure Hospitals divisions.
Community mental health provisions
The Trust provides community based mental health services for people across Nottingham City, Nottinghamshire County, and Bassetlaw. We have pharmacy teams of independent prescribing pharmacists, clinical pharmacists, and clinical pharmacy technicians providing technical, clinical, and prescribing support to patients on a regular basis within these services.
Offender health pharmacy
We provide pharmacy services for offender health across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Lincolnshire. We are comprised of a wide range of pharmacy professionals including pharmacists, technicians, and assistants - working on different aspects of medicines optimisation including medicines management procurement, clinical screening, medicines administration, and prescriber support.
Medicines administration technicians
During 2022 we will be introducing the new role of medicines administration technicians to the Adult Mental Health inpatient wards. This is an exciting opportunity to develop the role of the ward pharmacy technician and we will be a ward-based role where focus will be for the technicians to provide overall medicines optimisation and medicines administration to patients from the beginning of their stay on the ward to the point at which they are discharged from the ward.
Medicines safety
The Medicines Safety Team promote the safe use of medicines within the Trust through improving reporting and learning from medicines incidents by identifying, developing, and promoting best practice.
Career stories at Notts Healthcare
Chief Pharmacist
Rotational Pharmacist
Senior Pharmacy Technician
Pharmacy Assistant
Specialist Clinical Pharmacist
Development opportunities
All our pharmacy services are underpinned by comprehensive training and the Trust encourages and supports many development opportunities, both internal Trust organised and external independent courses and qualifications.
Pharmacists, and technicians where appropriate to the role, are supported to complete postgraduate certificates or diplomas in clinical and psychiatric pharmacy through a variety of universities. This has recently included Aston University (PG Cert/PG Dip in Psychiatric Pharmacy) and De Montfort University (PG Cert and PG Dip in Clinical Pharmacy).
Some of the other training our team have had the opportunity to undertake recently include:
- Accredited independent prescribing pharmacist programmes
- Training opportunities provided via College of Mental Health Pharmacy (CMHP) including Psych Techs, Psych One and Psych Two courses
- Courses provided via professional bodies such as APTUK, UKCPA, RPS, SPS, CPPE and MHRA
- Training via the East Midlands Leadership Academy
We encourage our staff to become active members of professional bodies available to their profession to further support their development and professional careers.
We have pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who are active members of many such organisations, for example the College of Mental Health Pharmacy (CMHP). These members are encouraged and supported by our Trust to attend courses, conferences, and produce posters to be presented at the conferences. We have had many successes with our staff presenting posts at CMHP and have won many awards over the years.
We have staff members that are part of Association of Pharmacy Technicians UK (APTUK) and other professional bodies and we encourage active involvement.
Where possible staff are supported to attend professional pharmacy conferences and webinars for example SPS webinars, Clinical Pharmacy Congress, and the CMHP conference.