009 Global Health Pharmacist: Claire Brandish

Claire is an experienced, inspiring, strong-minded, yet very modest antimicrobial pharmacist. She started her career with an interest in care of the elderly, an area of pharmacy that she wasn't expecting to love as much as she did. The idea of making clinical interventions and de-prescribing to prevent falls, for example, intrigued her. She highlights the fact that elderly patients take so many medications and this is a prime area for pharmacists to make a difference in patient care.

Her first experience of working in infectious diseases was at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for a 6 month rotation in Clinical Governance and Risk combined with Antimicrobials. This role was a great combination as antimicrobial prescribing is a constant battle between weighing up risks vs taking the medication and the governance aspect of this role is also very similar. This role allowed Claire to experience directorate level work in audits, quality assurance, writing guidelines, and implementing NPSA alerts.

She fell in love with infectious diseases in this job and hasn't looked back! She loves working alongside consultants and going on ward rounds, making positive changes to prescribing, ensuring patients aren't having unnecessary antibiotics to begin with, IV to oral switches etc. The role involves a lot of governance too - guideline writing and policy development, auditing, and service improvement - elements of the job that Claire thoroughly enjoys!

In November 2018 whilst working at Buckinghamshire NHS Trust, there was a call for NHS staff to support proposals to tackle Antimicrobial Resistance in commonwealth countries in Africa. The Commonwealth Partnerships for Antimicrobial Stewardship (CwPAMS) scheme has supported 12 health partnerships across Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia to fight AMR. The CwPAMs projects, started in February 2019, have been supported by the Commonwealth Pharmacy Association (CPA) and Tropical Health Education Trust (THET).

The Chief Pharmaceutical Officer Global Health Fellows programme is the first Global Health fellowship for pharmacists funded by Health Education England (HEE). It compliments the CwPAMS programme and aims to support pharmacists by furthering leadership and project management skills throughout their work on the projects.

Claire and her team have embraced this opportunity and she talks about her experience in detail in the podcast!

You can follow Claire on Instagram @brandmennis and on twitter @Clairebrandish1.

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