Advanced Practice Toolkit
Supporting Advanced Practice in Primary Care: What can we do?
Notes on terminology
Terminology around advanced practice and advanced practitioners is evolving. Although Advanced Practitioner is now the generally accepted term, many papers use Advanced Nurse or Advanced Clinical Practitioner. In addition, the term Advanced Practice may describe a level of practice rather than a role. With this in mind, we have tried to avoid the use of the abbreviations AP (advanced practice or advanced practitioner), ANP (advanced nurse practitioner) and ACP (advanced clinical practitioner) wherever possible, and usually their use indicates a direct quote.
Health Education England (HEE) has now merged with NHS England (NHSE). However, due to its previous role in the development of advanced practice, it will be referred to when accurate (e.g. when referring to a document that was written when HEE was still the relevant body) throughout.
We use the term background profession to refer to the profession that people originally trained in.
This Paper
This paper is intended as a set of evidence based guidance on supporting an advanced practice workforce. It should be read in conjunction with the HEE governance framework [16]. Further information is available in the accompanying literature review [50].
The paper is set out as a series of tips, supported by the evidence base. It is not intended to be read cover to cover, and each chapter stands alone. The chapters are as follows: