This programme is designed to meet the needs of already experienced and current paediatric eye-care practitioners (orthoptists, optometrists and ophthalmic nurses) who want to advance their specialist ophthalmic practice skills. As such, the programme has been developed around the NHSE (previously HEE), 2017 publication: Multi-professional framework for advanced clinical practice in England. Eye-care practitioners who wish to reach the highest levels of innovative and cutting-edge paediatric ophthalmology practice will benefit from this course.
Advanced clinical practice (ACP) is a defined level of practice within clinical professions and designed to transform and modernise care pathways to enablie safe and effective skills-sharing across traditional professional boundaries.
This programme is a Masters (level 7) degree, designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to allow you to expand their scope of practice and thus better meet patient need. Advanced clinical practice is founded on the four ACP pillars of clinical practice, leadership and management, education and research. Under Course information you will find modules which clearly reflect the ACP pillars and can view the flowchart of how these come together to form a clear education pathway through this degree programme, in paediatric ophthalmology.
The underpinning standards and governance of ACP are found in the Multi-professional framework for advanced clinical practice in England, which 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 ACPs are driven by service need and how employers require the level of practice to be deployed within their healthcare setting. The paediatric ophthalmolgy ACP is a new and bespoke role based upon the needs of the paediatric ophthalmology and we are working hard to develop evidence and guidance around this role and professional scaffolding, as our ACPs progress and develop. You can find further information relating to trainee and ACPs from the Orthoptists base profession on the British & Irish Orthoptic Society pages on advanced practice: https://www.orthoptics.org.uk/resources/acp/
Further information on what advanced practice is and why is it important can be found on these NHSE webpages: https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/advanced-clinical-practice/what-advanced-clinical-practice
The role of the advanced clinical practitioner (ACP) is rapidly developing across many medical specialties, but this is the first course specifically crafted to develop advanced skill in paediatric ophthalmology. Orthoptists, Optometrists and Ophthalmic nurses have been taking on specific areas of extended and advanced roles in ophthalmology for some time now and excellent areas of practice have been established in different regions of the UK. Despite the huge benefits of advanced practice in terms of timely access for patients to diagnostic tests and treatment, advanced practice in ophthalmology has largely remained regionally organised and managed. On a national scale, this has limited patient access to clinicians and has left many ophthalmologists clinically overburdened in regard to both training upcoming clinicians and patient load. It has also meant that already advanced clinicians have been limited in which areas of the UK they can be recognised and practice in. In writing this course, our aim has been to capture the excellent practice which has been developed between eye-care practitioners and Ophthalmologists, in different areas of the UK, and use the expertise of already established practice to share learning materials and expertise in the communication, diagnosis and management strategies for a wide breadth of paediatric ophthalmology conditions in which ACPs can work. We hope that the programme will facilitate you to achieve a comprehensive and advanced knowledge and skillset in paediatric ophthalmology and that you will feel inspired to consider possible patient-centred improvements to service provision.