Advanced Nurse Practitioner - role tensions and ambiguity
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Surfacing the practice tensions of the Advanced Nurse Practitioner; A situational analysis of how ANPs manage and reconcile role ambiguity.
IRAS ID
270009
Contact name
Jane Harden
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cardiff University
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Advanced Nurse Practitioner (ANP) roles have developed in the NHS over the past twenty years in response to changing patient and service needs. The role lies somewhere between the traditional jobs in medicine and nursing and although there definitions and frameworks to better explain the role there remains a broad lack of understanding. Previous research has identified the benefits of an ANP within a team particularly for their ability to ‘get things done’ (McDonnell et al, 2015) but what this actually means and how they did it was unclear. The NHS is recognised as a Complex Adaptive System and has unwritten rules,confusing ways of working and traditional barriers that restrict who is allowed to make decisions and to care for patients. This causes tensions and challenges for those working in advanced practice roles. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore further how ANP’s work within their teams and how they manage to ‘get things done’ in the complex systems that exist in a large hospital. To investigate and identify all aspects of how ANPs manage to do their job and demonstrate their competence a research method known as Situational Analysis will be used. ANP’s, managers, medical and nursing staff who work with or supervise ANPs will be interviewed to gain understanding of how ANP’s work.
REC name
N/A
REC reference
N/A