Impact of advanced autonomous non-medical practitioners in emergency care: protocol for a scoping study.

Introduction: Emergency care services are looking for new models of care delivery to deal with changing patient demographics and increased pressures. It has been suggested that advanced non-medical practitioners might be valuable for delivering such new models of care. However, it is not clear what the impact of the deployment of advanced non-medical practitioners in emergency care is.

An autonomous role in emergency departments.

Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, which manages 250,000 patients in three emergency units each year, has created an advanced clinical practitioner (ACP) role to ensure that patients can be seen in a timely manner as demand for emergency services continues to rise. Advanced clinical practitioners are non-medical clinicians who eventually work autonomously at the level of middle-grade doctors and manage patients with all types of clinical presentations in the emergency department (ED). This article provides an overview of the development and benefits of the ACP role and outlines the phases of a programme for staff who wish to achieve senior clinician status in the ED.

Good intentions, increased inequities: developing social care services in Emergency Departments in the UK.

Addressing the quality of services provided in Emergency Departments (EDs) has been a central area of development for UK government policy since 1997. Amongst other aspects of this concern has been the recognition that EDs constitute a critical boundary between the community and the hospital and a key point for the identification of social care needs. Consequently, EDs have become the focus for a variety of service developments which combine the provision of acute medical and nursing assessment and care with a range of activities in which social care is a prominent feature.

The patient experience in emergency departments: a review of the literature.

This paper analyses the literature on the patient experience within emergency departments. We identify six themes within the literature: waiting times, communication, cultural aspects of care, pain, the environment and dilemmas in accessing the patient experience. Overall, the literature has a North American bias and is largely quantitative in approach.