Staffing

We recently said farewell to Cathy and Aimee from the dispensary team, our sincere thanks to them both for their service here. We also welcomed Donna to the team and wish her well in the new role.

This year we have also welcomed a new Clinical Pharmacist (Heelen) and a Pharmacy Technician (Chloe) to the team. Please see below for a bit more about these roles.

Premises

We are looking forward to a few things in the surgery building soon. The Friends of Tangmere have successfully fundraised to provide an information screen for the waiting room, huge thanks to all involved, it will be installed in the next 1-2 months.

In addition, we are planning to gradually refresh the internal walls all around the practice so some painting will commence shortly…

Events

We are currently planning a few educational events for patients for 2025. These are likely to be daytime 1 hour events, please do let reception know if you have any specific ideas for topics for these.

Topic of the month

The roles of Clinical Pharmacist and Pharmacy Technician. Heelen and Chloe are here to support clinicians and patients with medication monitoring and changes. This work is important to help make sure we all use medications safely and to make sure we are using our medications in the right way so that they are effective.

So that you know what to expect from them, some of the ways they do this are:

-          Communicating directly with patients by phone, message or in person appointments to review medications and recommend or make adjustments

-          In a similar way to our Nursing team, as a Clinical Pharmacist, Heelen is also able to help patients manage some of their long term conditions

-          Analysing the data from all our patients taking regular medications to make sure we remind patients and book blood tests or other investigations when needed

-          Keeping up to date with changes to guidance or regulations and running audits. This enables them to recommend changes and share information with all our prescribers, an important part of making sure are continuously learning as a team.

The training for these roles is significant over several years. Ongoing clinical supervision, as for all our clinical team, is a something we always protect time for.