Research is an integral part of advanced and consultant practice. As such, it is the key ethos of the research pillar in the multi-professional frameworks for advanced and consultant practice.
Advanced practice is:
- associated with a wide range of multi-professional backgrounds who work in advanced practice roles across numerous settings.
- a level of practice, not a job title or role, designed to transform and modernise pathways of care, enabling the safe and effective sharing of skills across traditional professional boundaries for practitioners working directly with patients, carers, and families, who have responsibility for managing risk and uncertainty.
- characterised by a high degree of autonomy and complex decision making and delivered by experienced and registered healthcare practitioners.
An advanced academic award or equivalent expert and autonomous experience encompassing four pillars: underpins this level of practice. The four pillars of advanced level practice:
The Centre for Advancing Practice Research activities focus on the fourth pillar. Encouraging, facilitating, and celebrating research in the advancing practice community.
The Multi-professional framework for advanced clinical practice in England (Health Education England, 2017), and more recently the Multi-professional consultant-level practice capability and impact framework (NHS England, 2023) both articulate the expected core capabilities spanning all four pillars of practice in advancing practice—including the expected integration of the research pillar—and describe the development into the consultant level of practice for research and innovation.
International Journal for Advancing Practice July 2023
Developing research of advanced practice
The Centre is developing research of advanced practice by bringing together like-minded a community of practitioners and researchers engaged in the field of advanced practice innovations. With a remit for established researchers, novice researchers, and enabling advanced practitioners to progress into clinical academic roles as practitioner researchers.
The Centre for Advancing Practice convenes an annual conference. The conference offers researchers and practitioners alike to showcase their activities in progressing advanced practice. Either through presenting concurrent sessions or submitting research posters. The abstracts of which are subsequently published in the International Journal for Advancing Practice.
In collaboration with the Health Sciences School at the University of Sheffield the Centre participates in doctoral research peer support group for doctoral student researchers involved in research related to advanced practice and / or are practitioners at an advanced level themselves.