Letter from Chair

Published: 18 January 2011

Jenny Aston reports on an exciting forum conference, the latest on ANP regulation and puts out a call for stories on the impact you’ve had on patients in your role as an ANP.

A wonderful event...

We had a very successful ANP Forum Conference in London last November. If you were not there, you really missed out! I would be surprised if anyone left the conference without having a great deal upon which to reflect and hopefully act. We had a good mix of political, educational and clinical sessions, with something for everyone. I found it challenging and it has given me fresh ideas to put into practice, especially in relation to caring for older patients.

One session which demonstrated ANPs’ huge impact was Graham Lloyd-Brandrick’s story of improving care on the Isle of Man. He has looked at practical ways to improve services for patients as well as make big savings. His impact was so noticeable that I had to ask: ‘What happens when you are not there?’ He replied that he was trying to appoint and train up another ANP to share the responsibility. We hope to have most of the presentations from the conference on the RCN website as soon as presenters give their permission.

A story to tell?

At the conference there were so many examples of ANPs impacting on patient care that we have decided to start collecting some of these together to help inspire others and provide examples of these effects. We would encourage you to write a short resumé of the impact you are having on patient care. You need to explain your role, the context of your work and briefly describe something you have done that has had an impact on care.

If you have carried out an audit to provide evidence, so much the better, but what we need are stories. If you are not happy about writing it, the forum’s Newsletter Editor Ghislaine Young has offered to carry out a brief interview and write it for you. Once we have a reasonable number we will find the best way to put these together and make them accessible. The aim of collecting these stories is to demonstrate the breadth of ANPs’ impact on care.

Online information

You will likely all be aware of the Government paper Healthy lives, healthy people: our strategy for public health in England, which has just been published. Health prevention is at the heart of ANP work, so this document will prove useful to you in accessing funding to do more preventive health care. I would encourage those of you who want to engage with commissioning health improvement to access an excellent online training programme the RCGP has designed to help GPs and other health care professions with the process of commissioning (you have to join the foundation to access it).
 
There has been no sign of any further progress from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) on regulation. What we do know is that Dickon Weir-Hughes is committed to some form of regulation of advanced practice and the NMC is appointing someone to look at advanced practice. Perhaps it is time to get writing to the NMC asking how it plans to use the Department of Health (DH) position statement to implement some form of regulation of advanced practice to protect the public from nurses who do not have the educational underpinning or necessary competencies to carry out an advanced role. 

DH and ANP regulation...

We now have the long-awaited DH advanced practice position statement. Although very little is new information, it is a useful document that we hope educators, employers and especially the NMC will use to make it much harder for nurses to practice in advanced roles without the underpinning or the education or skills to carry out the role.

I would, of course, have preferred to have seen DH support for the regulation of advanced practice. Hopefully, all universities running advanced practice programmes will respond to the masters level referred to in the document. Where ANPs do not have at least a postgraduate diploma, universities will need to support ex-students in achieving the necessary amount of credits to attain that level. This is one subject that we are considering addressing at next year’s conference. If you are unsure about this, do contact the university where you did your degree-level training and I am sure they will be able to help with directing you to any courses you could do to make up your credits.

One organisation that is likely to take note of this document is the Care Quality Commission. My hope is that they will be able to request that organisations make sure that nurses working in advanced roles will have been adequately trained and demonstrate competence as outlined in this position statement.

Thanks and good luck!

I would like to express my thanks to the committee for their help in organising and running the conference. I would also like to wish Andrew McGreggor, who has stood down from the committee due to work commitments, good luck in the future.