Advanced Clinical Practice

Entry requirements

Applications are welcomed from nurses, pharmacists, paramedics and allied health professionals who:

• Are currently working in a health care environment for a minimum of 20 hours a week
• Hold professional registration with a relevant UK professional/statutory body, for example the NMC, HCPC or GPhC.
• Have a Bachelor's degree in a health related subject with a minimum 2:2 honours classification.

Where applicants do not hold a first degree, applications will be considered on an individual basis. However you will be required to submit evidence of relevant experience and continued professional development.

Months of entry

September

Course content

The MSc Advanced Clinical Practice (ACP) supports registered healthcare practitioners in their continued professional development to Masters Level, focusing on their role, sector and specialist area in line with the NHSE (2017) Multi-professional Advanced Clinical Practice framework.

At the beginning of the course, students will identify their own learning needs in collaboration with their Clinical Supervisor, Manager and Personal Academic Tutor to create an individualised route through the programme that builds on their existing knowledge, skills and experience, whilst enabling achievement of competence and capability at the level of an Advanced Clinical Practitioner.

Students can choose to develop more specialist competencies (e.g. College of Emergency Medicine ACP competencies) through the Negotiated Learning Module; or can apply to transfer existing Level 7 credits from modules congruent with their clinical specialism, through the Recognition of Prior Learning route in place of the Negotiated Learning module. Students completing this course will be able to lead and support advanced clinical practice, facilitating change in patient and service outcomes.

This course can also be studied via an apprenticeship route. The Advanced Clinical Practitioner Apprenticeship (ACPA) has been designed to meet both the National Masters Degree Apprenticeship Standard and the Multi-professional Framework for Advanced Clinical Practice in England (NHSE 2017). It offers an opportunity for health and social care employers to identify and develop expertise and talent throughout their organisations equipping practitioners with the skills, values and behaviours to develop their advanced role or innovate services.

Key features

• Options to develop individualised learning plans in collaboration with your employer to ensure you develop clinical competence in your own speciality, sector and setting.
• A learning environment in which you develop a sustainable ability to shape future health and social care provision and delivery through responsiveness, improvability and changeability.
• We offer opportunities for you to develop and demonstrate competence and capability at an advanced level; through supervision and support in the workplace and assessment of your competence and capability.
• We provide a flexible, multi-professional, route to postgraduate achievement centred around you.
• We encourage intellectual challenge through the promotion of critical analysis, evaluation and problem solving and functioning at an advanced level of practice.
• We provide the possibility to design and conduct, with support, a substantive, independent, service improvement project, in response to organisational need, with the potential to innovate new practices and influence change.
• We promote opportunities for career advancement as an Advanced Clinical Practitioner.

Objective

The objective of the programme is summarised in the West Midlands Advanced Clinical Practice (Health Education England 2015, p.15) definition and in line with the Multi-Professional framework for ACP (NHS England 2017) to develop:

‘A registered practitioner with an expert knowledge base, complex decision-making skills and clinical competencies for expanded autonomous scope of practice, the characteristics of which are shaped by the context in which the individual practices. Demonstrable at masters’ level and meets the education, training and CPD requirements for Advanced Clinical Practice as identified within the framework’.

Information for international students

Applicants whose first language is not English should have an IELTS of 7 overall, with no component lower than 5.5.