MSc Advanced Clinical Practitioner (Apprenticeship)

After choosing your route, you'll gain advanced communication, clinical assessment, examination, and clinical decision-making and management skills in your field of practice. You'll develop the ability to critically analyse, synthesise, and review care decisions by discussing, debating, and reviewing alternative approaches to care delivery.

You'll set a range of locally negotiated competency areas which may be role or profession specific to facilitate the journey towards advanced practice. You'll then deconstruct a complex case from practice and critically appraise the care decisions made, the interventions undertaken, and identify, debate, and analyse the key components of your decision-making.

In this module, you'll learn to become a safe and effective prescribing practitioner. You'll work in practice with an assigned practice assessor who is a registered healthcare professional and experienced prescriber with suitable equivalent qualifications. You may also work with other practice supervisors, including non-medical prescribers, pharmacists, or doctors, where relevant, to gain a wider understanding of prescribing practices.

This module will allow you to develop your advanced communication, clinical assessment, examination, clinical decision-making, and management skills in your field of practice. You'll gain the ability to critically analyse, synthesise, and review care decisions by discussing, debating, and reviewing alternative approaches to delivery that meet the medico-legal requirements in preparation for a Paediatric Advanced Clinical Practitioner (ACP) role.

You'll cover topics that focus on:

• History-taking skills
• Physical assessment skills
• Mental health assessment in the child
• Management of minor illness, ailment, and injury
• Management of common paediatric conditions, referral points, and limitations of ACP remit in paediatrics
• Diagnostic indicators
• Clinical decision-making skills
• Clinical decision-making theory
• Medico-legal law for advanced practice
• Evidence-based advanced practice
• Safeguarding, referral processes, and the identification of risk in paediatric care
• Working with families and holistic approaches to care and management.

In this module, you'll develop the ability to complete a focused assessment of the patient with chronic disease and clinical decision-making and management skills in relation to chronic diseases. You'll gain the ability to critically analyse, synthesise, and review care decisions in relation to chronic disease management by discussing, debating, and reviewing alternative approaches to care delivery that meet the medico-legal requirements for advanced practice and have ethical and moral principles embedded throughout.

You'll cover topics that focus on:

• Assessment skills of the patient with chronic disease
• Assessment of the patient with exacerbation/decompensation of chronic disease
• Holistic assessment and disease management approaches
• Advanced application of the care and interventions across the disease trajectory including rehabilitation, acute admissions avoidance strategies, carer support, patient self-management techniques and the importance of palliation in chronic disease management
• Clinical decision-making theory in chronic diseases
• Clinical decision-making skills in chronic disease management
• Medico-legal law for advanced practice
• Evidence-based advanced practice in the management of chronic disease.

To access this module, you must have Level 6 clinical skills or equivalent.

You'll develop a wider, role-specific knowledge of medications management relevant for advanced clinical practice in this module. You'll advance your ability to critically analyse, synthesise, and review care decisions in relation to medicines by discussing, debating, and reviewing the appropriateness of interventions and alternative approaches to care delivery, including pharmacological and therapeutic interventions which meet the medico-legal requirements for advanced practice and have ethical and moral principles embedded throughout. 

You'll cover topics that focus on:

• Reflexivity in the assessment of own learning goals and competency areas for practice in relation to medicines management
• Consultation skills and the facilitation of shared decision-making in medicines management
• Understanding how medicines work, the effect this may have on presenting symptoms, and how to ensure appropriate medicines management to maintain health and wellbeing within scope of practice
• Compliance and concordance with medicines
• Reviewing and monitoring of medicines
• Therapeutics in context
• Governance in the context of medicines management and therapeutics
• Evidence-based advanced practice in the management of medicines
• Analysis of the changing scope of practice in therapeutic interventions.

This module is perfect for practitioners prescribing in new or advancing roles, those who can't prescribe but need an enhanced knowledge of medicines management in context (for example occupational therapists), or those who require enhanced medications knowledge as part of their professional credentials (for example RCEM).

In this module, you'll fulfil the requirements of the role as outlined in the national framework for the ACP Education Pillar. You'll engage in peer learning and practice community and your individual partnerships with your practice, educational and academic supervisor.

You'll gain confidence and expertise by creating an inclusive learning environment, linking to the standards for learning and assessment in practice using teaching and learning methodologies in clinical practice. You'll then develop teaching materials, ensuring a teaching plan is formulated, along with differing approaches to learning, such as simulation scenario, recognising peer support alternate learning styles, and coaching approaches.

This module will help you evidence and better understand and use leadership capabilities as a lesser-known dimension of advanced clinical practitioner roles. You'll develop language that describes leadership to help you recognise the leadership capabilities you demonstrate as part of your daily practice.

You'll gain the ability to describe your leadership role to policymakers, decision-makers, other healthcare professionals, and the public, enhancing understanding of the role and optimising leadership capabilities in dynamic, unpredictable settings. You'll also develop leadership capability to improve service and practice and lead across patient, organisational, and system goals.

In this module, you'll develop your abilities in critical appraisal, research utilisation, and the application to informing and improving clinical practice. You'll start to understand the wider context of evidence-based practice and the scientific paradigm, developing a deeper understanding of the philosophical, theoretical, and methodological basis of clinical research and the practical application of research concepts and findings to advanced practice.

You'll then explore the underpinning rationale behind clinical developments from a research, political, and ethical perspective, analysing the role of evidence-based practice from a policy-making perspective and considering the wider issues which interplay to shape clinical services. This will allow you to gain the confidence to disseminate research findings across your clinical networks.

This module will allow you to reflect on and provide evidence of the contextualisation of the four pillars of advanced practice as relevant to your area of practice. Utilising a systematic approach to critical enquiry, you'll identify and deconstruct pertinent issues in the literature to develop a comprehensive review of a relevant topic to your specialist area, taking into account the socioeconomic and political drivers underpinning service development, delivery, and practice change. This critical review will form the basis for a comprehensive discussion prepared for publication to a peer audience.

On successful completion of the apprenticeship, you'll be able to manage defined episodes of clinical care independently, from beginning to end, providing care and treatment from the time an individual first presents through to the end of the episode, which may include admission, referral, or discharge or care at home.

At this stage, the MSc degree will have combined academic and work based learning and assessment together with the End Point Assessment that provides synoptic assessment of the achievement of knowledge, skills, and behaviours outlined in the HEE Advanced Clinical Practice Framework and Apprenticeship standard. This assessment will deliver a valid, reliable, and independent judgement that you've achieved the standard required in order to be awarded the MSc Advanced Clinical Practitioner.