Advanced Clinical Practitioner

On an advanced clinical practitioner apprenticeship course, you’ll help independently manage defined episodes of clinical care, providing care and treatment.

An advanced clinical practitioner manages specific clinical care experiences independently from beginning to end, providing care and treatment from when a person first arrives until the experience concludes, which may include admission, referral, discharge, or home care.

As an apprentice, you will work hard to become an expert in your field. You’ll be in charge of all elements of people’s physical and mental health in acute, primary, urgent, and emergency settings, including hospitals, general practises, people’s homes, schools, and prisons, as well as the public, independent, private, and charity sectors.

In addition, you’ll use your professional clinical skills to research, teach, and provide clinical leadership in your area. You’ll get a master’s degree in advanced clinical practice upon completion.

What you’ll learn

On an advanced clinical practitioner apprenticeship course, you’ll learn to:

• Maintain a high level of autonomy and responsibility for your decisions and omissions; follow your professional code of conduct, professional standards, and scope of practice.
• Use multi-agency and inter-professional resources, critical thinking, independent decision-making ability, problem-solving skills, and professional judgement to create and act on potential diagnoses.
• Assess people for risk factors and their impact on health and well-being; support and encourage people to manage their health and make informed choices. And give them an ongoing plan for preventative and rehabilitative activities.
• Daily, use clinical reasoning abilities to plan and manage complex and unexpected episodes of care; analyse events to improve future care and service delivery. Discharge or appropriately relate to alternative services
• Initiate and evaluate a range of treatments, including the prescription of medicines, therapies, and care.
• Ensure the safety of individuals and families by adequately managing risk.
• Seek for and use current, high-quality, evidence-based resources and existing and emerging technology as required.
• Recognise and respond to people’s motivation, developmental stage, and ability; cooperate to allow individuals to make health and well-being-enhancing care choices.
• Assess one’s individual learning needs and engage in self-directed learning to maximise one’s ability to lead and improve care and services.
• Collaborate to identify and meet health and care professionals’ learning and development needs; encourage practise education, and serve as a role model and mentor.
• Advocate for and contribute to developing an organisational culture that promotes lifelong learning and development, evidence-based practice, and succession planning.
• Demonstrate the impact of advanced clinical practice in your field and on the community.
• Use your extensive clinical expertise to provide advisory services across professional and service lines; drive service development. And influence clinical practises to enhance quality, productivity, and value.
• Seek and actively participate in peer assessment of your own and others’ practices outside traditional health and social care limits.
• Identify the need for change, create practise innovations, act as a role model, and lead innovative practice and service redesign solutions in response to individual feedback and service requirements.
• Establish and exercise your distinctive scope of practice within legal, ethical, professional, and organisational norms, procedures, and codes of conduct to reduce risk and enhance the care experience.
• Identify and manage risk in one’s and others’ clinical practice; be willing and competent to challenge others.
• Engage in research; develop and apply evidence-based techniques that are evaluated to enhance health and care quality, safety, productivity, and value for money.
• Evaluate and audit your clinical practice and others, then act on the findings.
• Notify individuals and organisations of evidence gaps; initiate and/or lead evidence-based initiatives targeted at improving clinical practice and adding to the evidence base; and help others build their research ability.
• Critically analyse and synthesise research, evaluation, and audit results; apply to your own and others’ practise promote the adoption of evidence-based norms, policies, and clinical recommendations serve as a connection between clinical and research practise
• Create and implement robust governance systems, as well as stringent documentation procedures.

Entry requirements

You’ll usually need:

• Current registration with one of the statutory regulators of health and care professions.
• Apprentices without level 2 English and maths will need to achieve this before taking the end-point assessment.

Assessment methods

The End Point Assessment comprises two distinct assessment methods: 

• Open Book Examination  
• Presentation of practice 

Duration, level, subjects and potential salary upon completion

Apprenticeship standard

More information about the Level 7 Advanced Clinical Practitioner Apprenticeship standard can be found here.

Apprenticeship end point assessment

For more information about the End Point Assessment Process, please read the Institute of Apprenticeships’ information page.