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Advanced Practice: Reconnecting the Midlands Conference 2023
Our Midlands regional advanced practice conference, co-hosted with the Midlands Advanced Practice Forum, took place at the Studio in Central Birmingham on Friday 24th March. It was a great success – with approximately 165 delegates – there was a real buzz and energy in the main room amongst delegates and there was a lot of positive commentary on twitter and via feedback received. It was a good opportunity for networking, sharing ideas, and promoting the advanced practice agenda across the Midlands region. We heard plenary presentations on various subjects including integrated care systems, advanced practice credentials, admission avoidance (including a poem!), professional identity in advanced nursing practice, and discussed clinical imaging requests for advanced practitioners. In the breakout sessions varied topics such as clinical academic development, supervision and assessment, experiences of the ePortfolio (supported) Route, and multidisciplinary team working were engaged in by delegates and speakers alike. The evolution of the Advanced Practice Forum from the West Midlands to the Midlands Advanced Practice Forum was launched, which was so good to see progressing as a pan-Midlands collaboration. Prizes for the winners of the poster competition were also presented.
Thank you to all to all the delegates for attending the conference – we do appreciate you making the time to attend hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thank you too for all our speakers for making the time to present at our conference, and for all our conference planning team partners from across the region.
Selected recordings from the conference sessions will be available on our website shortly.
After the success of this event, we feel inspired to plan a next regional conference in 2024 – so if you would like to get involved either as event planner, speaker, or helper on the day please do contact us.
#APMidlands23
Health Education England has merged with NHS England – what this means for you
Health Education England has come together with NHS Digital and NHS England to create a new organisation on 1 April 2023. This means that the new NHS England will take responsibility for HEE’s current activities, and the name Health Education England/HEE will no longer be used.
A new national Workforce, Training and Education (WT&E) Directorate in the new NHS England is led by Dr Navina Evans (former Cheif Executive of HEE) as the Chief Workforce, Training and Education Officer for the new directorate. Our statutory responsibility remains to ensure the NHS in England has a sufficient supply of qualified staff. This includes planning, recruiting, educating and training the health workforce; ensuring that the healthcare workforce has the right numbers, skills, values and behaviours to deliver excellent healthcare and health improvement to patients and the public.
The new NHS England will reduce current duplication and bring the NHS’s people, skills, digital, data and technology expertise together into one organisation. The new organisation will be smaller than the sum of its predecessor organisations (NHSE, NHSD and HEE) meaning fewer people will work for it.
The transfer to the new NHS England will have no significant impact on students or educators. The Midlands Faculty for Advancing Practice team will continue to support all trainees and students as always and support will not change.
Please continue to link in with your usual contacts and teams at the same email addresses. We will keep you informed of any changes as and when they occur.
If you have any questions about this, please continue to contact us on apfac.midlands@hee.nhs.uk to discuss, which will remain as our email address for the time being.
Advanced Practice ESR Guidance
Guidance has recently been published on how to code advanced practice roles on the electronic staff record (ESR). This guidance is intended to clarify the correct coding of advanced and trainee advanced practitioner roles and will be useful for Advanced Practice Leads, HR Directors, workforce analytical teams, professional and service leads and anyone with responsibility for ensuring accuracy of NHS workforce data. You can access the guide here. This guide does not replace the existing ESR guidance published by NHS Digital, which can be found here National Workforce Data set guidance documents.
International Journal for Advancing Practice
Exciting news! The preview issue of the International Journal for Advancing Practice as published in January, and the first full edition was published in April. This new journal, which is supported by the Centre for Advancing Practice will be published on quarterly basis. It is intended for the journal be a partnership between colleagues in the advanced practice community from all its different perspectives and professional groups, authoring and contributing papers to the journal for sharing of innovations in advanced practice in formats such as clinical reviews, research papers, service improvement evaluations, commentaries, evidence reviews, literature reviews, and editorials. So please do consider contributing to the journal; the members of the journal’s Editorial Board can provide advice and guidance on developing papers for submission. The journal will also need peer reviewers for submitted papers, so please do think about offering to get involved, even if you haven’t been a peer reviewer before, the journal aims to develop all aspects of our advancing skills – the crucial feature needed is your experience and expertise as an advanced or consultant level practitioner.
Trainee Data Collection
The 7 regional faculties for advancing practice have recently implemented the usage of a ‘Trainee data Collection Form’ which will enable effective monitoring of advanced practitioner trainees across the regions so a reliable dataset of trainees (both apprenticeship and commissioned) can be obtained. Starting this current academic year, we are implementing the use of our Trainee Data Collection Form across the 7 regions which will enable us to build up a data set of the profile of our trainees, including key information such as registrant backgrounds, and for tracking pauses, progression, and completions.
If you an advanced practitioner trainee in the Midlands in either year 1, or 2, or 3, and have not done so already, please complete the Trainee data Collection Form via this link.
Midlands Supervision and Assessment Funding
Financial Support for Supervision and Assessment
Supervision and assessment funding is now paid for trainees who commenced their advanced practice programmes from September 2022 onwards. Funding will be at a rate of £2,600 (pro-rata) per trainee, per academic year, and it will be for commissioned places, trainees on apprenticeship, and for top-ups.
This funding is to support your organisation to comply with the requirements of the new Centre’s (2022) Advanced practice workplace supervision: Minimum standards for supervision which require supervision being provided for a minimum of 1 hour per week per advanced practice trainee by an appropriately trained supervisor.
The Faculty also recently delivered two webinars around the recently released Minimum Standards for supervision and how to utilise these in practice. The first webinar focused on Trusts/ ICS leads, training hub and practice leads along with HEI course leads whilst the second discussed support for supervisors/ trainees. Both had examples of how the supervision funding HEE are providing for trainees at present could be used in some innovative ways to ensure quality supervision and ultimately patient safety. We had examples from United Hospitals of Derby and Burton and Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals. These sessions are available to view on our website under webinars and recordings.
What are the minimum standards?
The Centre of Advancing Practice have taken the Workplace Supervision for Advanced Clinical Practice document and looked at how organisations can operationalise this within their practice settings. As part of this work, we have produced a guidance document that outlines what the minimum standards should be for supervision when employers are thinking about developing an advanced practice role.
The Advanced Practice minimum standards of supervision have been published and can be accessed here.
HEE Faculty Educators Development Symposium FEDS Conference – Essay Competition Winner
Last year, as part of the Corrinne Camilleri-Ferrante Award, Health Education England ran a national essay competition which was open to all healthcare professionals. The subject of the essay was ‘Holding onto Humanity’ and the brief to entrants given as follows: “We want colleagues to share the things that help keep them human. We face profound challenges in our professional and personal lives. Factors like tiredness, low morale or loneliness can undermine our ability to provide compassion to patients and ourselves. There are fantastic stories of individuals and teams working with compassion and resilience using many of the wider humanities such as music, art, spirituality that complement the science of healthcare. We want to hear your story, especially your experience of the pandemic.”
We were delighted to see the success of Helen Kolb, winner of this year’s award. Helen is an Advanced Practitioner working in the Emergency Department at Nottingham University Hospitals and presented her work at the recent East Midlands Educator Conference hosted by HEE, her essay provides a very personal reflection on working through the pandemic, which will resonate with many. We are pleased to be able to share this with you. Read Helen’s essay here.
You can also read a little bit about Helen here: My name is Helen. I grew up in the Middle East, in the Sultanate of Oman. On returning to England, I spent my teenage years in North Yorkshire and eventually ended up at the University of Leeds. Initially I did a degree in Theology and Religious Studies and so had much more spare time than most healthcare students. I spent my holidays volunteering both locally and internationally. In my second year, I decided to take on the challenge of cycling from Leeds to Paris, but on my first training ride, I hit a pothole, went over my handlebars, and broke both my elbows and knocked out my three front teeth. I spent five days in hospital and didn’t have a very positive experience. The only meaningful interaction I had with any of the staff was when the doctor asked me if I’d looked in the mirror yet. I said “no”. He said “good, probably best not to”. I thought I want to do better. So, after completing my Theology degree, I then went on to do Nursing.
Jump forward 13 years and I now work as an Advanced Clinical Practitioner in the Emergency Department. I qualified as an Advanced Practitioner towards the end of 2019, 5 months before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold across the world.
It was October 2021, and I received an email at work advertising an essay competition that Health Education England were supporting that was titled ‘Holding onto Humanity’. In December 2021, I had fallen down the stairs, fractured my clavicle (there’s a theme here!) and despite my protestations, I was non-clinical for a few weeks. As someone who thrives on being busy, I found myself with a lot more time on my hands and so I entered the competition. It has been an honour to share my story.
Centre for Advancing Practice “Advanced” Digital Badges
In December 2022 the Centre for Advancing Practice launched its ‘Advanced’ digital badge for supporting and recognising advanced practice educational and training equivalence, either through the Centre’s programme accreditations or its ePortfolio (supported) Route. This ‘Advanced’ digital badge is available to graduates of Centre accredited MSc advanced practice programmes and completers of the ePortfolio (supported) Route. Digital badges indicate accomplishment, skill, or quality earned through learning, which can be authenticated online and in real time. They recognise and celebrate learning or professional development achievements and offer assurance of education, training, and experience. Through initiatives such as the ‘Advanced’ digital badge, the Centre for Advancing Practice oversees the workforce transformation of advanced level practice, by implementing and monitoring standards for education and training, accrediting advanced level programmes, supporting and recognising educational and training equivalence, and growing and embedding the advanced and consultant practice workforce across the continuum of enhanced to advanced to consultant levels of practice. These activities of the Centre and its regional faculties are key to public safety in advanced practice as they ensure there is a more standardised approach to the education and training and subsequent utilisation of advanced practitioners.
Advanced Practice Networks
The Centre for Advancing Practice alongside the regional faculties are keen to provide practitioners with spaces to connect and support one another. As a result of this two virtual networks have recently been launched; Mental Health Network, and Learning Disability and/ or Autism Network, more details for each can be found below.
Join our Advanced Practice Mental Health Network
With nearly 600 members to date our network offers a space to connect people aspiring to be, training to be or working as an advanced practitioner in mental health. We also welcome those who support the development of the workforce including regional and national strategic leaders and MSc programme teams.
The network compromises of a series of live virtual events and a virtual platform accessible 24/7 where members can contribute to discussions, network, access resources and connect with other members across England.
To join the Network and book a place at the virtual events, please visit this webpage.
If you do not have an account on our platform linked above, please complete our registration form.
Join our Learning Disabilities and/ or Autism Network
A pilot network for Advancing Practice in Learning Disability or Autism has now been launched. The free to join facility is a place where aspiring, trainee and qualified advanced practitioners and consultants in learning disability and/or autism can go to get advice, peer support and to share best practice. It will also offer members the opportunity to influence the development of advanced practice roles. Virtual events are also being planned alongside the 24/7 community platform.
To become a member, please complete the virtual network registration form.
Case Studies
Experienced advanced practitioners! We want you to share your experiences of working in your role.
Case studies help us to show how advanced practitioners can help people, teams, organisations, and the wider population.
Please share your wisdom with us by emailing apfac.midlands@hee.nhs.uk for further information and a template.
Content Request – Call for Ideas (We want to hear from you)
A post pandemic world has taught us that we can be more connected than ever before and share content in more ways than one.
We want to hear from you, our valued readers, trainee and qualified practitioners; are there any webinar, update bulletin, and website topics or content we could consider that may be useful for you? We have created a short form for you to let us know what you want to hear from us.
An introduction to the Governance Maturity Matrix
NHS employers recently hosted a series of webinars on the Centre for Advancing Practice Governance Maturity Matrix for those out in the system across provider organisations and training hubs. For further information and to view the webinar recording please see : https://www.nhsemployers.org/events/introduction-governance-maturity-matrix
East and West Midlands Clinical Senate – Assessing variabilities in access to imaging requests for advanced practitioners working in acute trusts across the Midlands
An exciting piece of work that has been completed by a group of our Leadership Fellows on behalf of the East Midlands and West Midlands Clinical Senates. This work has been carried out in collaboration with Health Education England (HEE). For the last 18 months, this project has been looking into variations in practice across all providers in the Midlands with regards to access to imaging requests for advanced practitioners. This evaluation has covered all aspects from organisational policy to national guidance and individual lived experiences, all within a report. The report contains a series of recommendations to support organisations evaluating their own policy in this area to enable effective and appropriate utilisation of this highly valuable workforce.
The Leadership Fellows presented at the National Advancing Practice conference last November, run by the Centre for Advancing Practice where the work was very well received. As part of this, the Leadership Fellows and key stakeholders in the project produced a very comprehensive video presentation which explains the work and the conclusions. Given the scale of the project, the final report has a lot of material to cover, thus the video presentation of this work can also be viewed online here. The full report is also available on the following website Midlands Clinical Senates – Proactive Projects.
Midlands Regional Mental Health Priorities
For those of you that attended the ‘National Advancing Practice Conference’ (Mental Health Session) We introduced the concept of establishing and agreeing our ‘Midlands Regional Mental Health Priorities’ We would like to continue this work by establishing a small regional working group/ forum to agree and embed our priorities. It is vitally important that we have regional representation from our stakeholders and trainee/advanced practitioners in mental health for this work to go ahead. This time commitment for this will be approximately 1.5 hrs per month. If you would like to volunteer to be part of this working group, please contact the faculty inbox at apfac.midlands@hee.nhs.uk with the following information – Name, Role/Job Title/ Organisation and we will contact you to organise a suitable date to meet.
Implementation Guide for advanced practice in midwifery
The implementation guide provides an overview of advanced practice in midwifery and offers insights into topics including education and training, workforce planning, governance, supervision, and career development. Links to other resources and case study examples are also included. For further information please click here
New Capabilities Framework (released Nov 2022)
The Advanced Clinical Practice in Midwifery Capabilities Framework has been produced in order to help create the new midwifery roles required to meet the health needs of the population. This framework has been produced following analysis commissioned by Health Education England and the recommendations that came from it. This will help Directors, Heads of Midwifery and midwifery workforce in their application process and decision making towards having ACPs in maternity.
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) core advanced curriculum
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) core advanced curriculum, updated at the end 2022 describes entry-level standards for advanced pharmacists working in patient focused role and provides assessment to assure pharmacists have the capabilities to practice at an advanced level.
The RPS, Centre for Pharmacist Postgraduate Education (CPPE) and the Centre for Advancing Practice have worked together to support pharmacists to be recognised as practicing at an advanced level of practice in line with RPS Core Advanced curriculum and the Centre’s Multi-professional framework for advanced practice. Those who successfully complete the RPS e-portfolio assessment will be recognised as an “advanced pharmacist”. Engagement in this collaborative process between the RPS and the Centre will mean pharmacists working in advanced practice roles will have recognised equivalence in level of advanced practice to those who have completed the Centre’s ePortfolio (supported) Route or a Centre accredited advanced practice programme with those different pathways all conveying eligibility for the Centre’s “Advanced” digital badge.
So, in really exciting news, after the initial call for interest via the centre for advanced practice, the first cohort undertaking the CPPE/RPS ePortfolio in conjunction with the Centre rolled out this March 2023. Our advanced practice training programme director (TPD) for pharmacy, Hirminder Ubhi, started this process alongside other pharmacists within the first cohort and looks forward to updating you on their journey through this process.
If you have any questions around this process please get in touch: apfac.midlands@hee.nhs.uk