Advanced Clinical Practice - First Contact Practitioners
What is Advanced Clinical Practice
According to Health Education England Advanced clinical practice (ACP) is a defined level of practice within clinical professions such as nursing, pharmacy, paramedics, and occupational therapy. This level of practice is designed to transform and modernise pathways of care, enabling the safe and effective sharing of skills across traditional professional boundaries.
It is a level of practice characterised by a high degree of autonomy and complex decision making. Advanced clinical practice embodies the ability to manage clinical care in partnership with individuals, families, and carers. It includes the analysis and synthesis of complex problems across a range of settings, enabling innovative solutions to enhance people’s experience and improve outcomes.
What are the Benefits of Advanced Clinical Practice
- Having healthcare professionals at advanced level increases capacity and capability within services.
- By integrating into multi-professional teams, advanced practitioners provide clinical leadership and enable collaboration across the multi-disciplinary team through complex decision making and managing risk.
- This also gives organisations a flexible workforce to meet changing population, patient, and service delivery needs.
- Advanced practitioners help to improve clinical continuity and provide high-quality care for patients.
- They enable workforce transformation to initiate a wider range of advanced clinical care being provided by a varied range of multi-professional clinicians rather than focusing on medical doctors as the sole providers of advanced clinical care.
- Advanced practitioners can accelerate access to care for patients and help to improve outcomes.
Advanced Clinical Practitioners
Advanced clinical practitioners (ACPs) are healthcare professionals, educated to master’s level or equivalent, with the skills and knowledge to allow them to expand their scope of practice to better meet the needs of the people they care for.
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A definition of ACP, its underpinning standards and governance, can be found in the Multi-professional framework for advanced clinical practice in England. The framework ensures there is national consistency in the level of practice across multi-professional roles that is clearly understood by the public, advanced clinical practitioners, their colleagues, education providers and employers. The roles undertaken by advanced clinical practitioners are determined by the needs of the employer and how they require the level of practice to be deployed within their setting.
A series of video's and Case studies have been made available by HEE that focus on the ACP role, training and features one- to- one interviews and written case studies from ACP outlining their journey. For an overview of the role, click here |
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A definition of ACP, its underpinning standards and governance, can be found in the Multi-professional framework for advanced clinical practice in England. The framework ensures there is national consistency in the level of practice across multi-professional roles that is clearly understood by the public, advanced clinical practitioners, their colleagues, education providers and employers.
The roles undertaken by advanced clinical practitioners are determined by the needs of the employer and how they require the level of practice to be deployed within their setting.
A series of video's and Case studies have been made available by HEE that focus on the ACP role, training and features one- to- one interviews and written case studies from ACP outlining their journey.
For an overview of the role, click here
What is a First Contact Practitioner (FCP)
First Contact Practitioners (FCP) are a diagnostic clinician working in Primary Care at the top of their clinical scope of practice at Agenda for Change Band 7 or equivalent and above.
It is the minimum threshold for working as a first point of contact with undifferentiated undiagnosed conditions in Primary Care. With additional training, FCPs can build towards advanced practice.
To become an FCP, recognition is required through Health Education England, whereby a clinician must have completed a taught or portfolio route.
FCPs refer patients to GPs for the medical management of patient presentations and pharmacology outside their agreed scope of practice.
FCPs work at a master’s level (level 7) in their clinical pillar of practice but have not yet reached an advanced level in all four pillars of practice to be verified at AP level.
The clinician must typically have 3-5 years post preceptorship experience before starting Primary Care training to become an FCP (HEE).
Roadmaps to Practice
Allied health professionals (AHPs) can become first contact practitioners (FCPs) or advanced practitioners. Health Education England has developed a Roadmap for Practice for AHPs to show evidence of their capability for these roles. AHPs who have demonstrated these capabilities will be able to see and manage more clinically complex patients. They will also be able to work independently in primary care, within their scope of practice.
The Network Contract DES provides role descriptions for allied health professionals employed through the reimbursement scheme. Most AHPs will be working at a master’s level clinically. Paramedics will have an option to be reimbursed at a lower level in a rotational scheme. These paramedics are not first contact practitioners.
Clinicians completing the capability framework will be recognised by Health Education England's Centre for Advancing Practice and will be placed on a First Contact Practitioner directory in due course.
The capability framework clearly articulates capabilities so that employers and workforce planners can understand what the clinicians can offer to the multi-professional team to enable the best care for their patient population. It also provides clear guidance of the expected supervision needed to support the roadmap to practice and outlines the bespoke supervision training that a supervisor needs to have completed.
The Centre uses ‘credential’ to describe standardised, structured units of assessed learning that are designed to develop advanced-level practice capability in a particular area. Please click here to find out more.
Any first contact practice queries, you can contact the first contact practice team directly- fcprecognition@hee.nhs.uk
Example of a job description for a FCP physiotherapist / MSK.
Educational Pathway into Primary Care
There are two main educational pathways to practice in Primary Care:
- FCP portfolio and taught routes with onward portfolio route or a taught AP master’s to AP in Primary Care.
- AP portfolio or taught routes with the addition of the required Primary Care KSA training and e-learning HEE
