Multi-professional advanced practice credentials
Multi-professional advanced practice credentials are an important component of developing a responsive, flexible workforce to meet changing population, patient and service delivery needs. Credentials’ development, delivery and take-up should increase advanced practice capability and capacity. In turn, this should support sustainable, high-quality approaches to meeting population needs and deliver patient benefit.
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The Centre’s approach to credentials
A key workstream for Health Education England’s Centre for Advancing Practice is overseeing the development and quality assurance of multi-professional advanced practice credentials to address high-priority, at-scale workforce development needs. The Centre’s approach fully aligns with HEE’s Advanced Practice Framework.
The Centre uses ‘credential’ to describe standardised, structured units of assessed learning that are designed to develop advanced-level practice capability in a particular area. We use ‘credential specification’ to describe the open-source documents that set out the learning experience and outcomes (including the advanced practice area-specific capabilities) that a credential should develop and assess.
Credential specifications are intended for delivery by education providers. This includes as modules integrated within universities’ Centre-accredited advanced practice Master’s degree programmes.
The Centre has developed a credential approval and assurance process. This spans credentials’ development, recognition and review. The Centre supports the development of new credential specifications’ development, where this is in line with high-priority population, patient and service delivery needs and where an advanced practice credential is a logical workforce development intervention. The Centre has gateway criteria relating to this stage of the process.
The Centre supports the development of credential specifications in selected areas. It considers draft credential specifications through an independent review process, against its endorsement criteria. Once credential specifications are endorsed, they are published as open-source documents for delivery by education providers.
Centre-endorsed credential specifications, and their implementation, are subject to quality review processes. This is to ensure that specifications remain responsive to need and that there can be a shared stakeholder confidence in their delivery and take-up.
Please read our briefing document on the Centre’s approach and glossary for further information.
Information on how credentials relate to other types of workforce development intervention is also available.
Access further information linked to our credentials work using the navigation to the right of this page and the useful documents below.
Useful documents
FAQs on the delivery and take-up of Centre endorsed credentials
These key messages and frequently-asked questions (FAQs) accompany the release of new Centre-endorsed credential specifications.
The material explains the Centre’s approach to multi-professional advanced practice credentials. It does not relate to other organisations’ approaches to credentials.