'I wasn't on the front line , but I was part of health care': Contributions and experiences of ancillary staff in care homes in England during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives: Ancillary staff - cleaning, catering, housekeeping and laundry workers - play a crucial role in care homes, by promoting infection control, food preparation and hygiene, and contributing to the care home environment. This study sought to understand the experiences of ancillary staff working in English care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results will inform policy makers, employers, care home managers and others, both in England and overseas, as how to best support the ancillary workforce.

The development of the new assistant practitioner role in the English National Health Service: a critical realist perspective.

Adopting a critical realist perspective, this article examines the emergence of a relatively new non-professional healthcare role, the assistant practitioner (AP). The role is presented as a malleable construct cascading through and sensitive to structure-agency interaction at different levels of NHS England: the sector, organisation and department. At the core of the analysis is the permissiveness of structures established at the respective levels of the NHS, facilitating or restricting agency as the role progresses through the healthcare system.

Re-evaluating the assistant practitioner role in NHS England: Survey findings.

Aim And Background: In the absence of data providing an overview on the state of the assistant practitioner (AP) workforce, this study surveys trusts in NHS England with the aim of establishing how the role is viewed, used and managed.

Methods: Based on an earlier survey undertaken around a decade ago, an online questionnaire was sent to members of an assistant practitioner network, generating a response from over fifty different trusts, drawn from different regions and health care settings.

Results: The survey results highlight the increased use of assistant practitioners by trusts and in a more diverse range of clinical settings.