Medical Secretary -Palliative Care

Job overview

The purpose of this job is to be responsible for providing a full secretarial and PA service to the Specialist Palliative Care Team within WVT. The role involves working for the Consultants and their team and supervising junior secretarial/clerical staff. The role is initially based in the Palliative Care Department but there may need to be flexibility in working throughout the Clinical Support Services Directorate as service needs require.

Main duties of the job

Please see attached Job Description for full duties

• Act as the first point of contact for patients, carers and professionals contacting the SPCT. Receiving and recording referrals, incoming telephone calls and messages and using judgement and experience to establish priority of contact. Dealing with contacts quickly and appropriately to ensure a professional and efficient service is maintained.
• Dealing with emotive and stressful crisis calls from existing service users, carers and members of the public.
• Dealing with bereaved families and signposting to relevant services as necessary.
• Answering of all departmental telephone calls, internal and external, assessing the nature of the query and dealing with as appropriate. Necessitating a tolerant, understanding and compassionate manner to deal with anxious and distressed patients, relatives and doctors.
• Managing and responding appropriately to correspondence via the joint email boxes.
• Open, prioritise and date stamp all incoming mail, deal with routine mail requests or disseminate to appropriate staff member for action where appropriate.
• Manage incoming referrals via telephone, SPCT e-mail, Emis and Maxims and flag to the clinical team as appropriate.
• Book both outpatient appointments and DV’s as required.
• Maintain and update clinical activity within Palliative Care database.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Please see attached Job description for for full duties:

• Completion and distribution of all correspondence dictated through the digital dictation system.
• Attend weekly SPCT MDT meetings and updating database in a timely manner.
• Ensure results reports are obtained and brought to the attention of the clinical team in a timely manner.
• To regularly meet and work collaboratively with the Acute Palliative Care admin team, ensuring effective cover for both Acute and Community sites during periods of leave.
• Maintain an effective and efficient filing system of both paper and electronic records carrying out reviews/improvements as and when required.
• Attend the quarterly team meetings and take minutes as required.
• Maintain Consultants weekly diary, organising and booking meetings as and when required and ensuring all study and annual leave requests are processed through Medical Staffing.
• Coordinating student spoke placements with the SPCT, sending out student packs, preparing and distributing educational materials and certificates.
• Data collection in preparation for AGM.
• Maintain effective communication and cross working across the SPC service.
• Manage own workload and prioritise accordingly, acting within own initiative under a flexible approach.
• To order and receipt good on the Integra system.

Applicant requirements

The postholder will have access to vulnerable people in the course of their normal duties and as such this post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 (Amendment) (England and Wales) Order 2020 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service to check for any previous criminal convictions.