Advanced practice embodies the ability to manage complex clinical care autonomously, managing both acute and chronic undifferentiated diagnosis. This may mean that those working in advanced clinical practice might operate outside traditional service delivery boundaries and potentially, traditional professional boundaries. Training AP within your practice should be considered as a viable option for sustainable workforce planning to deliver care that meets your population needs.
Safe: It provides opportunity for patients to receive timely care and negate unnecessarily delay in receiving treatment, especially with the growing shortage of GPs in primary care.
Well led: Lead new practice and service redesign solutions in response to feedback, evaluation and need, working across boundaries and broadening sphere of influence.
Responsive:Continually develop practice in response to changing population health need, engaging in horizon scanning for future developments (e.g. impacts of genomics, new treatments and changing social challenges).
Effective: AP within primary care enhances the effectiveness service delivery by enabling the practice to offer the right care, to the right patient at the right time.
Caring: APs in the primary care are able to develop close, long-term relationships with their patients and work in partnership with them to achieve optimum health.
Consider how training your own AP in your practice could:
- Improve access to care delivery;
- Offer a sustainable solution to some of your succession planning
Employer responsibilities to the development of a Trainee Advanced Practitioner:
- To provide an advanced practice training post for the duration of the programme.
- To ensure that the development of the trainee, forms the organisations workforce plans for an Advanced Practitioner role upon successful completion of the programme.
- To ensure that the trainee has appropriate workplace clinical support, supervision, and assessment for the duration of the programme with an appropriately named clinical supervisor[s]. The supervisor[s] should have the required skills and knowledge to provide good quality and supportive supervision in correspondence with the requirements of NHS England’s (2020) guidance for Workplace Supervision for Advanced Practice: An integrated multi-professional approach for practitioner development and the NHS England Workplace Supervision for Advanced Practice document.
- A commitment to releasing the trainee from their duties in the Practice for the entire time required by the course/training without expectation to use annual/unpaid leave or non working days. This protected learning time is typically one day a week in university, and one day a week for supported clinical practice for the entirety of the programme.
- To ensure that the trainee receives the mandatory minimum of one hour of supervision per week over the course of their training, in correspondence with NHSE’s guidance. Of which, one in four (once a month) should be a scheduled hour with the co-ordinating education supervisor.
- Protected time should be allocated in the job plan for both supervisor and trainee.
- Remaining weekly supervision may be with the co-ordinating education supervisor or with an identified associate supervisor with knowledge and skills matched to the curriculum/competence/ capability focus of supervision for that week.
Workforce planning for advanced practice must consider not only the supervision needs of the trainee but the suitability and development needs of the supervisors. The ‘Employers advanced practice supervision action plan‘ document aims to help you identify and plan how your organisation and team within it, can ensure adequate workplace support for advanced practice development across all four pillars. Please note, completion and submission of this document forms part of the application process.
For more information or support, including the application process, contact the Staffordshire Training Hub: traininghub@gpfirst.net
Helpful resources for employers
- Advanced Practice Podcast – Workforce Planning
- Advanced Practice Supervisor Capabilities – Advanced Practice
- Funding for MSc Advanced Clinical Practice Programme 2026/2027 [including information on the education grant]
- Governance Maturity Matrix – a tool to help employers of Advanced Practice teams to assess and improve advanced practice standards. Further information can be found here and here.
- Midlands Faculty for Advancing Practice
- Supervision and Assessment Resources
- Workplace Supervision for Advanced Clinical Practice: An integrated multi-professional approach for practitioner development
- Workplace Supervision for Advanced Practice – Minimal Standards for Supervision