Evaluating the Implementation and Impact of the Advanced Practitioner Role for NHS North West
Started May 2005 – Ongoing
 
NHS North West is at the forefront of work to develop advanced roles in healthcare and has made a major commitment to evaluating the implementation and impact of these roles.  Acton Shapiro (assisted by colleagues from the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York) has been working with NHS North West for three years now, evaluating the implementation and impact of Advanced Practitioner roles across the North West.
 
The original focus of the work was on the introduction of Advanced Practitioner (AdP) roles across Greater Manchester, which was part of the SHA’s Delivering the Workforce programme, a system-wide workforce redesign initiative.  The evaluation has looked at the experiences of the Advanced Practitioners (AdPs) themselves, the effectiveness of academic and work-based learning on the development of the AdPs’ competencies, the organisational implications for the PCTs and Trusts which employ them and the impact of the AdP posts on service delivery and patient care.
 
Since the work in Greater Manchester began, NHS North West has been established and the new SHA decided to extend the evaluation to encompass other Advanced Practitioner developments in other areas of the SHA. We now have a portfolio of projects focusing on different aspects of the development and implementation of AdP roles. These are:
  • An evaluation of the implementation of Advanced Practitioner roles across Cumbria and Lancashire, where the universities involved have adopted a slightly different approach to the delivery of their MSc courses.
  • An assessment of the impact of introducing Community Matrons across Cheshire and Merseyside on both the PCT’s services for people with long-term conditions and on the Community Matrons themselves. The study, which was completed in March 2008, has also examined how the academic component of the Community Matrons training was commissioned and delivered.
  • An evaluation of three non-generic Advanced Practitioner roles - neonatal practice, child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) and anaesthesia practice – which have been established by Trusts in the North West alongside the Delivering the Workforce AdPs. 

The projects have involved a wide range of methods, including postal questionnaires, in-depth, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, the examination of policies and documents and the collation and analysis of data held by the trusts, in order to assess the impact of the posts.  We have also worked across the full range of health care organisations from GP practices to Foundation Trusts and with a very wide range of clinicians and managers, from the AdPs themselves (who are from a number of different base professions) to the consultants, GPs and senior staff who mentor, assess and manage them.

A number of reports are available from the projects, with the final reports from the main study being published in Spring 2009.