The Advanced Clinical Practitioner Role’s Benefits Report

Discussion

Benefits of the ACP role

The UK’s ACP role has led to various benefits such as being advanced, career pathways and influencing change in healthcare. The importance of being advanced has been attributed to expert practice and collaboration (Stewart-Lord et al., 2020). The role of ACP leads to the acquisition of skills that make healthcare professionals gain expert practice in leadership, autonomous practice, expert decision-making, and specialist clinical gains. ACP allows healthcare professionals to gain advanced knowledge in one part of the job, such as radiography, film reading, etc. (Woo, Lee, and Tam, 2017). These skills provide the ACP with specialist skills to handle complex cases and make critical clinical decisions on managing severe illnesses.

ACP also uses teamwork and collaboration to enhance safety and quality in its practice (Htay and Whitehead, 2021). They act as role models and mentors to the junior teams, which helps them to realize their full potential. In a study conducted by Lawler, Maclaine, and Leary (2020), a psychotherapist states that as advanced practitioners, they are expected to support and mentor junior staff, and therefore, they have to do extensive coaching even for new graduates. This enables them to retain their professional specialty.

The other benefit of the ACP role is based on career pathways. The ACP has led to diversified career paths, opportunities, and titles (Evans et al., 2021). ACP leads to evolved roles and structured career pathways in an organization. This enables to revolutionalize of healthcare by having several specialized posts that cater to rising patient care needs (Sánchez-Gómez et al., 2019). However, some career paths, such as art and drama therapists, were difficult to improve because they were misunderstood and not recognized by other professionals (Wallis et al., 2022).

ACPs have a significant role in influencing change in healthcare, and therefore they use these opportunities to improve service delivery. ACP also led to service developments and quality improvements whereby the professionals used the knowledge gained to innovate more creative ways of solving patient problems and transforming lives (Nadaf, 2018). Most ACPs have developed educational programs for their juniors and carried out different research, which helps in improving lives.

In a study by Evans et al. (2020), one radiographer states, “I have written up protocols, referral pathways and manuals for training as well.” Another physiotherapist states that he is running a local scoping study, and using that data, he has been able to apply and successfully got a doctoral fellowship from NIHR as a clinical academic (Nursing Times, 2022). This shows that the role of ACP is helping to influence and transform healthcare through quality improvement, research, and education.

How the Introduction of ACP Role Fits with Healthcare

ACP was officially introduced in 2017 in the UK by Health Education England, an NHS workforce development. The UK healthcare service is applied in four countries, including Wales, Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland, through the NHS (Hill, 2017). The NHS’s long-term plan is to have new integrated models that cut across traditional primary and secondary care boundaries (Lawler, Maclaine, and Leary, 2020). This plan calls for the utilization and investment in non-medical clinical roles with advanced skills to expand the workforce. This led Health Education England to plan and define a wide range of advanced skills by introducing Advanced Clinical Practice (Drennan et al., 2021). The national policy does not guide ACP development in the UK, but it is locally driven depending on the patient’s needs, responding to the specific employer needs, and lacks standardization in role specification, educational background, and role title (Evans, Pearce, Greaves and Blake, 2020).

Benefits of ACP to the Service

One of the main benefits of ACP is that it helps curb the problem of medical staff shortages. By introducing this new role, the NHS has accommodated more healthcare practitioners with varying job titles based on patient needs, which has helped reduce medical staff shortages (Oliver, 2022). This has ensured better service delivery in the UK healthcare system.

ACP has also improved the clinical decision-making process. The new role of ACP has significantly helped in clinical decision-making and enhanced the ability to deal with undifferentiated diagnostics (Hooks and Walker, 2020). The increased specialization brought by the ACP gives them enough experience, which makes it easy to make clinical decisions.

How Patients Benefit from ACP

ACP provides new models of offering care to patients. They have brought the em