Tim Donaldson Chief Pharmacist / Controlled Drugs Accountable Officer

About me

Tim is a Health Foundation Leadership Fellow and Chief Pharmacist / Controlled Drugs Accountable Officer at Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.

Tim gained an honours degree in pharmacy in 1986. He undertook a postgraduate diploma in Clinical Pharmacy in 1993 and then completed a Masters Degree in 1995. He completed a Masters level postgraduate course in pharmaceutical public health in 2008.

In the early part of his career, Tim worked within the pharmaceutical industry and in community pharmacy before undertaking training and management roles within hospital pharmacy and medicines information.

He had been his current role as Trust Chief Pharmacist at Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust since January 2010.

Tim had a particular interest in collaborative working with primary care colleagues in designing systems to improve access to, and the safety of, medicines which are initiated by specialists and continued by GPs (‘shared care’ arrangements).

His work on shared care prescribing has led to better and safer access in Newcastle and North Tyneside to NICE-recommended drugs for Alzheimer’s disease and has been commended by NICE and the Department of Health.  This has been achieved through the joint development of local shared care guidelines, and supported through a commissioning agreement with local PCTs which has also reduced health economy-wide expenditure on these drugs.

Tim also had a keen interest in continuing professional development and is a local therapeutics facilitator and author for the National Prescribing Centre, a department of a health-funded NHS agency which delivers a range of services and products designed to improve quality in prescribing and medicines management.

In these roles, Tim led a clinical network of ‘NPC Associates’, comprised of senior prescribing advisors from a number of primary and secondary care organisations across the north east SHA, and develops learning materials for NPC’s online learning environment NPCi.

He had been an active member of the Northumbrian branch of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain since 2001 and was branch chairman between 2006 and 2008.