GP Practice Pharmacist Support
GP Practice Pharmacist Support
Delivering remote clinical pharmacy services aligned to your practice workflow
Our GP pharmacist support service delivers structured remote clinical pharmacy to your practice. Our clinicians deliver this service through your clinical systems (EMIS Web, SystmOne, Vision or Medicus), and Virtual Pharmacist is accountable for the service it delivers, including its clinical governance, supervision and quality assurance.
This service is designed to significantly reduce GP workload, enhance patient safety, improve QOF performance, and create a more sustainable and efficient model of Primary Care.
How Will This Help My Practice?
Support to Reduce GP Workload
Enhanced Medicines Governance
Improved QOF & Local Incentive Outcomes
Continuity with Long-Term Pharmacists
“The team is consistently reliable. Phones are always answered and emails come back the same day. It’s made a real difference to how we run our medication reviews.”
“Fast email replies and clinical input whenever we need it. They picked up our medicines work seamlessly and delivered from day one.”
“Excellent service from start to finish. Easy to reach, quick to reply, and they clearly know NHS workflows inside out. We couldn’t recommend the team more highly.”
How Does Virtual Pharmacist Work?
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Frequently Asked Questions
What tasks do your pharmacists tackle for GP practices?
Our clinical pharmacists take on many tasks throughout the practice to reduce both administrative and clinical workloads and pressures on GP teams. They have capabilities to handle:
- Medication reviews, including structured medication reviews (SMRs) and medicines optimisation
- Repeat prescription requests and synchronisation
- Prescription signing by our independent prescribers
- High-risk drug monitoring
- Acute medication queries
- Long-term condition support, including atrial fibrillation, diabetes, respiratory conditions, hypertension, and heart failure
- Discharge medicines reconciliation
- Clinical coding and documentation
- Polypharmacy reduction and deprescribing support
What level of clinical work can your pharmacists do?
Our pharmacists are expertly trained to manage both routine and moderately complex medication-related tasks. This includes structured medication reviews, deprescribing, safety monitoring, reconciliation, and chronic disease optimisation.
Some of our clinical pharmacists are also independent prescribers, allowing us to take on prescription signing and extend the service’s scope where clinically appropriate.
Do your pharmacists support on-the-day patient demand?
Our pharmacists can handle medication queries, including repeat issues, optimisation questions and safety reviews, within agreed service hours, response times and clinical scope. Urgent concerns and work outside that scope are escalated through the practice’s agreed pathway.
Can you help with QOF?
Yes. Our pharmacists support coding, medication optimisation, follow-up actions and long-term condition management. All of these aspects contribute directly to practice QOF performance.
What a GP practice pharmacist service does for your practice
Our GP practice pharmacist service takes a defined part of your practice’s medicines workload and delivers it inside your own clinical system, to the priorities your GPs set. The same core team stays with your practice, learns your protocols and reports back on every piece of work.
Prescribing support for your GPs
Our independent prescribers sign prescriptions for the work they complete, so routine medicines changes move without adding to your GPs’ lists. Prescribing follows protocols agreed with the practice: our independent prescribers sign prescriptions within their competence, and anything outside it goes to the patient’s GP.
Set up around your practice
- Your GPs choose the work: registers, searches, queues or a project.
- We agree escalation routes and the clinical standard at the start.
- Our pharmacists work remotely in EMIS, SystmOne, Vision or Medicus.
- Every action is coded in the patient record as it happens.
- Regular reporting shows what was done and what needs a GP.
What practices have handed over
- QOF across the year: a practice of around 6,000 patients moved its medicines-related QOF work to us in August, with around 26 indicators worked steadily through the year.
- Medicines safety before inspection: three Northamptonshire practices with CQC inspection dates set had their medicines-safety searches built, run and worked through inside two weeks. CQC determines the inspection findings and rating.
Our longest-standing practices have been with us since 2021. Networks can commission the same service across every member practice: see PCN pharmacist services, or the full scope on clinical pharmacist services.
