Useful websites for primary care clinical pharmacists

Written by the Virtual Pharmacist clinical team

Moving into primary care as a pharmacist means learning a new set of reference points. The clinical knowledge transfers. What does not transfer is knowing which source to reach for when a GP asks a question mid-clinic, where the local prescribing decision was actually made, or which alert you are expected to have seen.

This is the working set, grouped by when you would actually use each one rather than as a flat list. Everything here is free unless noted.

At the desk, during a clinic

These are the ones open in a tab all day.

• BNF. The first stop for dosing, interactions, cautions and monitoring. The NICE-hosted version is free and current. The BNF for Children sits alongside it.
• NICE Clinical Knowledge Summaries. Condition-by-condition summaries written for primary care, with the management steps in the order you would actually work through them. The closest thing to a default answer for “how is this normally managed in general practice”.
• Specialist Pharmacy Service. The NHS medicines information service. Strongest on the awkward questions: medicines in pregnancy and breastfeeding, swallowing difficulties, administration via enteral tubes, and shortages.
• MedicinesComplete. Subscription, and many trusts and ICBs hold one. Worth asking whether you have access before paying for anything yourself.

Safety alerts you are expected to act on

In a GP practice, somebody has to notice these and do something with them. In many practices that somebody is the pharmacist.

• MHRA drug and device alerts. Recalls, safety warnings and regulatory changes. Subscribe to the email rather than remembering to check.
• SPS medicines supply notifications. Shortages, and the practical alternatives, which is usually the part you need at short notice.

Acting on an alert across a whole list is search work as much as clinical work. We have written about how drug alerts and recalls get worked through a practice.

Guidelines and the evidence behind them

• NICE guidance. The full guidelines rather than the summaries. Worth reading the ones covering your practice’s main long-term conditions properly, once.
• GP Evidence. Presents the size of benefit and harm for common primary care treatments in a form you can actually show a patient. Useful in medication reviews where the conversation is about whether to continue something.
• PrescQIPP. Bulletins and toolkits on prescribing quality and cost-effectiveness. Much of it maps directly onto the work an ICB will ask a practice to do.
• Your own ICB formulary. Not a national site, and the one most new starters miss. Local formulary choices override general guidance for a lot of day-to-day prescribing decisions, so find yours in the first week.

Prescribing data

• OpenPrescribing. Every practice and PCN in England, every month, by drug. You can see how your practice compares with its neighbours on any measure in about a minute. The single most useful free tool for finding where the prescribing work actually is, and it is the fastest way to arrive somewhere new with a sense of what needs attention.

Training and CPD

• CPPE. Free for pharmacy professionals in England, and the primary care pathway is the standard route for people moving in from community or hospital.
• NHS e-Learning for Healthcare. Free, broad, and where a lot of the mandatory and role-specific training sits.
• Red Whale Clinical Pharmacist Update. Paid, and widely used. Worth asking whether your employer already funds it.

Professional bodies and the rules

• General Pharmaceutical Council. Registration, standards and revalidation. The standards for pharmacy professionals are the ones your practice will assume you are working to.
• Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Professional body, with guidance on areas where the regulator is deliberately non-specific.
• Primary Care Pharmacy Association. The network specifically for pharmacy professionals working in general practice, which is a smaller and more relevant group than pharmacy as a whole.

The three things that are not websites

Most of what makes the first six months easier is not on this list.

Your clinical system’s search function. EMIS Population Reporting or the SystmOne equivalent will shape your working life more than any reference site. Learning to build and save your own searches is the highest-return skill in the role, because it turns “review the high-risk patients” from a vague instruction into a list.

A named person to ask. Supervision arrangements vary a lot between practices. Establish early who you take a clinical question to, and how quickly you can reach them.

The practice’s own protocols. How repeats are authorised, who signs what, what gets escalated. These are usually written down somewhere unglamorous and are rarely part of an induction.

If you are considering a move into primary care

Virtual Pharmacist works with GP practices and Primary Care Networks across the UK, and our pharmacists and technicians work remotely inside practice clinical systems. If you are a GPhC-registered pharmacist or pharmacy technician thinking about primary care, our current roles are on the careers page.

It is also worth reading what the job actually involves day to day before applying: how remote clinical pharmacist services work in practice.