The Role
Advanced level practice isn’t a specific role. Advanced Clinical Practice transcends a wide range of professional groups to ensure population health needs are met. Advanced Clinical Practitioners provide complete episodes of care for patients of any age with a wide variety and range of presenting problems and health care needs. Advanced Clinical Practitioners provide evidence-based, high-quality care for patients throughout their health and social care journey, enabling capacity, capability, productivity and efficiency within the system (NHS England 2019).
Advanced Clinical Practice is delivered by experienced, registered health care practitioners. It is a level of practice characterised by a high degree of autonomy and complex decision making. This is underpinned by a master’s level award or equivalent that encompasses the four pillars of clinical practice, leadership and management, education, and research, with demonstration of area specific clinical competence. Advanced Clinical Practitioners come from a range of professional backgrounds such as Nursing, Pharmacy and Allied Health Professionals.
Benefits for the Practice
- Highly skilled professionals able to provide complete episodes of care
- Screen patients for disease risk factors and early signs of illness
- Order necessary investigations, and providing treatment and care both individually, as part of a team, and through referral to other agencies
- Have the authority to admit or discharge patients from their caseload, and refer patients to other health care providers as appropriate
Benefits for the Patient
- Receive patients with undifferentiated and undiagnosed problems and assessing their health care needs, based on highly developed clinical knowledge and skills, including skills not usually exercised by registered healthcare professionals, such as physical examination
- Have a supportive role in helping people to manage and live with illness
- Providing quicker access to appointments and care
Training & Development
Advanced Clinical Practitioners undergo a 3-year training programme and are educated at Master’s Level. They will need to achieve sufficient competence in their clinical practice.
The Centre for Advancing Practice has now published many of their guidance documents on their Centre For Advancing Practice page on the NHS Learning Hub. It can be accessed via the link below.
NB: you will need a Learning Hub logon but if you don’t have one, you can set one up via the link below.
Centre for Advancing Practice Learning Hub site
This Learning Hub site doesn’t replace the webpage, but it is another place for key documents.
The resources linked on the Learning Hub are:
- Programme accreditation
- Centre-endorsed area specific frameworks
- Supervision and assessment (and this has the supervision documents here)
- Consultant practice
- Research
- Centre Portal (and this has links for the ePortfolio (supported) route information – so this may be really useful for those on that route)
And as per our previous email re: the Learning Hub – colleagues can also access the South East Advancing Practice Faculty Learning Hub page via the link below:
South East Advancing Practice Faculty Learning Hub Page
The Kent & Medway Multi-Professional Prescribing Review Tool is intended to support the review of documentation of consultations during which prescribing takes place.
The tool can be used for self-review as a temperature check to identify good practice and areas where further reviews or learning is required.
The tool can be used ad hoc and at a minimum linked to yearly reviews of scope of practice.
