Advanced Clinical Practitioners

What is an ACP?

Advanced clinical practitioners (ACPs) are healthcare professionals, educated to master’s level or equivalent, with the skills and knowledge to allow them to expand their scope of practice to better meet the needs of the people they care for.  ACPs are deployed across all healthcare settings and work at a level of advanced clinical practice that pulls together the four ACP pillars of clinical practice, leadership and management, education, and research.

ACPs usually have backgrounds in many fields but most are former nurses or paramedics.

We talked to Heather Symonds, Lead Advanced Clinical Practitioner at NCH&C about the role and why it is crucial to ensuring patients get the right care.

“NCH&C has a fairly well established ACP workforce as we’ve been working for a few years on progressing the role within the trust. We are fortunate to have a group of ACPs that come from multi-professional backgrounds.

“ACPs complete admission avoidance clinical assessments to support people to remain at home. Before we had this role, a medical assessment would need to be completed to indicate that the patient could stay where they were to be treated.  The ACPs liaise closely with GPs and update them on plans of care for patients following assessment.

“This is playing a vital role in making sure healthcare professionals across different organisations can offer patients more joined up care. It’s a very rewarding role when you can see that you are keeping people that want to be at home where they need to be to get well.”