Advanced Specialist Practitioner for Upper Limb in Preston

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced and motivated clinician to join our dynamic Multi-Disciplinary Orthopaedic Team as an Advanced Specialist Practitioner. You will be a key member of the Orthopaedic Team, working alongside Consultant Surgeons, Orthopaedic Registrars, Clinical Fellows, and AHP colleagues to deliver high-quality, patient-focused, evidence-based care within the upper limb surgical service. This role offers an excellent opportunity to work within a supportive environment that encourages professional development, innovation, and collaborative practice.

About You: You will be an enthusiastic and proactive Advanced Practitioner with excellent communication and teamwork skills. You will demonstrate a commitment to clinical excellence and continuous professional development, as well as a passion for delivering outstanding patient care. The Orthopaedic Team is proud of its ongoing commitment to research, audit, and education, you will be supported to contribute to these areas as part of your professional practice. This is a fantastic opportunity to join a team that values innovation, collaboration, and the delivery of exceptional care.

Main duties of the job:

• Demonstrates a critical understanding of broadened level of responsibility and autonomy and the limits of own competence and professional scope of practice, including when working with complexity, risk, uncertainty and incomplete information.
• Acts on professional judgement about when to seek help, demonstrating critical reflection on own practice, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and openness to change.
• Works in partnership with individuals, families and carers, using a range of assessment methods as appropriate.
• Demonstrates effective communication skills, supporting people in making decisions, planning care or seeking to make positive changes, using Health Education England’s framework to promote person-centred approaches in health and care.
• Uses expertise and decision-making skills to inform clinical reasoning approaches when dealing with differentiated and undifferentiated individual presentations and complex situations, synthesising information from multiple sources to make appropriate, evidence-based judgements and/or diagnoses.
• Initiates, evaluates and modifies a range of interventions which may include prescribing medicines, therapies, life style advice and care.
• Exercises professional judgement to manage risk appropriately, especially where there may be complex and unpredictable events and supports teams to do likewise to ensure safety of individuals, families and carers.
• Works collaboratively with an appropriate range of multi-agency and inter-professional resources, developing, maintaining and evaluating links to manage risk and issues across organisations and settings.
• Acts as a clinical role model/advocate for developing and delivering care that is responsive to changing requirements, informed by an understanding of local population health needs, agencies and networks.
• Can evidence the underpinning subject-specific competencies i.e. knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to the role setting and scope, and demonstrates application of the capabilities to these, in an approach that is appropriate to the individual role, setting and scope.

Communication:

• Maintains effective professional and productive communications with patients, relatives, the multi disciplinary team, external agencies, demonstrating advanced communication skills.
• Communicates potentially distressing information, diagnosis and advanced care planning including limitation of treatment to patients and relevant others as appropriate.
• Keeps accurate and complete records of all activities and communication consistently with legislation policies and procedures.
• Undertakes investigation and documentation of a range of adverse or untoward incidents.
• Refers appropriately on to other members of the MDT as required.
• Develops and implements professional practice standards, guidelines and policies in relation to area of expertise and with respect to the relevant codes of professional conduct.

Leadership and Collaborative Practice:

• Provides professional and clinical advice to colleagues regarding therapeutic interventions, practice and service improvement.
• Role models the values of organisation/place of work and demonstrates a person-centred approach to service delivery and development.
• Evaluates own practice, and participates in multi-disciplinary service and team evaluation, demonstrating the impact of advanced clinical practice on service function and effectiveness, and quality (i.e. outcomes of care, experience and safety).
• Actively engages in peer review to inform own and other’s practice, formulating and implementing strategies to act on learning and make improvements.
• Leads new practice and service redesign solutions in response to feedback, evaluation and need, working across boundaries and broadening sphere of influence.
• Actively seeks feedback and involvement from individuals, families, carers, communities and colleagues in the co-production of service improvements.
• Critically applies advanced clinical expertise in appropriate facilitative ways, to provide consultancy across professional and service boundaries, influencing clinical practice to enhance quality, reduce unwarranted variation and promote the sharing and adoption of best practice.
• Demonstrates team leadership, resilience and determination, managing situations that are unfamiliar, complex or unpredictable and seeks to build confidence in others.
• Continually develops practice in response to changing population health need, engaging in horizon scanning for future developments (e.g. impacts of genomics, new treatments and changing social challenges).
• Demonstrates receptiveness to challenge and preparedness to constructively challenge others, escalating concerns that affect individuals’, families’, carers’, communities’ and colleagues’ safety and well-being when necessary.
• Negotiates an individual scope of practice within legal, ethical, professional and organisational policies, governance and procedures, with a focus on managing risk and upholding safety.
• Ensures that the service is responsive to patients’ need that clinical governance procedures underpin the service to ensure provision of robust, safe and high-quality care.
• Develops plans for continuous improvement of care and patient experience through engagement with all levels of staff and patients to capture improvement ideas.
• Identifies and manages risk proactively contributing to the development of robust governance systems.
• Uses financial acumen in patient/client, team, organisational and system level decision-making and demonstrates appropriate strategies to enhance quality, productivity and value.

Education – developing self and others:

• Critically assesses and addresses own learning needs, negotiating a personal development plan that reflects the breadth of ongoing professional development across the four pillars of advanced clinical practice.
• Engages in self-directed learning, critically reflecting to maximise clinical skills and knowledge, as well as own potential to lead and develop both care and services.
• Engages with, appraisal and responds to individuals’ motivation, development stage and capacity, working collaboratively to support health literacy and empower individuals to participate in decisions about their care and to maximise their health and well-being.
• Facilitates collaboration of the wider team and supports peer review processes to identify individual and team learning.
• Identifies further developmental needs for the individual and the wider team and supports them to address these.
• Supports the wider team to build capacity and capability through work-based and inter-professional learning, and the application of learning to practice.
• Acts as a role model, educator, supervisor, coach and mentor, seeking to instil and develop the confidence of others.
• Proactively promotes the workplace as a positive learning environment encouraging all professionals to learn from each other and from external good practice.
• Undertakes training and mentorship of staff within the appropriate clinical environment.
• Maintains a personal development portfolio in line with Trust policy and professional registration.
• Ensures personal training and development is completed in accordance with trust training needs analysis and personal development plan in order to fulfil role.

Research:

• Strives constantly to improve practice and health outcomes so that they are consistent with or better than national and international standards through initiating, facilitating and leading change at individual, team, organisational and system levels.
• Continually develops practice in response to changing population health need, engaging in horizon scanning for future developments (e.g. impacts of genomics, new treatments and changing social challenges).
• Demonstrates an understanding and application of a range of research methodologies.
• Evaluates and audits own and others’ clinical practice, selecting and applying valid, reliable methods, then acting on the findings.
• Critically appraise and synthesize the outcome of relevant research, evaluation and audit, using the results to underpin own practice and to inform that of others.
• Takes a critical approach to identify gaps in the evidence base and its application to practice, alerting appropriate individuals and organisations to these and how they might be addressed in a safe and pragmatic way.
• Actively identifies potential need for further research to strengthen evidence for best practice. This may involve acting as an educator, leader, innovator and contributor to research activity and/or seeking out and applying for research funding.
• Disseminates best practice research findings and quality improvement projects through appropriate media and fora (e.g. presentations and peer review research publications).
• Facilitates collaborative links between clinical practice and research through proactive engagement, networking with academic, clinical and other active researchers.
• Develops and implements robust governance systems and systematic documentation processes, keeping the need for modifications under critical review.
• Acts as expert triage clinician on receipt of all MSK referrals into LTHTR.
• Identifies possible serious pathology and co-ordinates appropriate and timely management plans.
• Requests appropriate radiological, pathology and neurophysiology investigations in line with Trust policies.
• Directs effective conservative and surgical treatment plans autonomously or with discussion with the Consultant.

Person specification:

• Current Professional Body registration.
• MSc in Advanced Clinical Practice/Digital Badge in Advanced Practice or equivalent experience.
• Evidence of continuing professional development within the specialist area.
• Independent/Supplementary Non-medical Prescribing (where legally able to).
• Teaching Qualification (7307/Certificate in Education/equivalent) or willing to undertake.
• Leadership/Management qualification or willingness to undertake.

Knowledge & Experience:

• Experience of the delivery of pre-operative and post-operative care to a surgical patient cohort.
• Sound level of knowledge of orthopaedic and Musculo-skeletal conditions.
• Sound level of knowledge in relation to invasive and non-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in the management of upper limb conditions.
• Sound level of knowledge in the management of both acute and chronic pain presentations.
• Proven leadership experience including delivering to targets and service improvement.
• Demonstrates current knowledge of professional and NHS issues and the implication for clinical environment.
• Experience of clinical research.
• Experience in managing chronic health issues.
• Broad & advanced knowledge of clinical pathophysiology.

We are committed to promoting equality of opportunity, celebrating and valuing diversity and eliminating any form of unlawful discrimination across our workforce, ensuring our people are truly representative of the communities we serve. All individuals regardless of race, age, disability, ethnicity, nationality, gender, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, religion or belief, marriage and civil partnership, neurodiversity or veteran status are encouraged to apply for this post.