Advanced Nurse Practitioners: scope and impact

Advanced Nurse Practitioners (ANPs) utilise skills and practices which move beyond traditional nursing. Various drivers have influenced their development and implementation.

ANPs are now working across a range of settings and specialist areas. Recent evidence would suggest that ANPs have a positive impact for patient outcomes as well as nursing and the wider workforce. With numbers expanding rapidly both in UK and internationally, interest is growing in the nature of advanced nursing practice, and indeed the ways in which the role is deployed and placed within the multidisciplinary team (MDT). There is particular interest in the ways in which ANP roles are understood internationally and across nursing settings and specialisms. As a result a number of key questions have arisen in recent years. These include, how does the nature of advanced practice nursing vary across international settings, how do current ANPS view their role and how do these views vary from other stakeholder organisations? Furthermore there is an urgent need for evidence on the relationship between advanced nursing practice and patient outcome.

This PhD studentship seeks to explore the nature of ANP roles across a range of settings, both in the UK and elsewhere. Students will then be encouraged to focus on a particular field of nursing, in either secondary or primary care, to explore in more detail the relationships between the use of ANPs and outcomes for both patients, nurses themselves and the MDT.

The successful candidate will utilise a mixed methods approach and seek to integrate primary (quantitative and qualitative methods) and secondary (such as realist review) methodological approaches in seeking to provide answers to the above questions.