PGDip Advanced Nurse Practitioner

Course details On this course you will usually be taught by a range of staff with relevant expertise and knowledge appropriate to the content of the unit. This will include senior academic staff, lecturer practitioners who work at the university and in practice as Advanced Nurse Practitioners, other and other qualified healthcare professionals. The course will facilitate the development of your critical appraisal, analytical and reflective skills, and enable you to integrate new advanced clinical skills and knowledge with your existing experience within your practice setting, in order to support the provision of high quality care and service delivery as an autonomous practitioner within a multi-disciplinary healthcare team. This part-time course has six taught units. You'll need to attend university once a week during term time over the two years. Core units Professional Issues for Advanced Practice: You’ll explore contextual aspects surrounding advanced practice, as well as the development of your advanced professional role while analysing and debating recent developments relevant to your clinical practice. This first unit helps set the scene for your developing advanced practice role and is also the starting point for your advanced practice portfolio. Advanced History Taking & Physical Assessment: You will develop knowledge and skills that will enable you to obtain a comprehensive patient history, perform a complete physical assessment of all body systems and distinguish normal findings from pathological ones. You’ll learn to accurately describe observations and findings using appropriate terminology. Advanced Health Assessment & Decision-making: Here, you’ll develop skills of clinical reasoning and decision-making at an advanced level and the ability to formulate differential diagnoses, This unit follows on from the advanced history taking and physical assessment unit, supporting you in the development of knowledge and skills for planning and managing patients within complete packages of care, working in partnership with patients, carers and multidisciplinary team. Independent & Supplementary Prescribing: This unit meets the government agenda for non-medical prescribing and through successful completion of this course and achievement of competencies in your practice area, you will gain a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) recordable prescribing qualification. The curriculum has been devised following Department of Health guidelines and by collaborating with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). Learning and teaching will take place at the university and in practice. Lectures will be followed with question and answer sessions and analysis of case examples. Principles of Disease Processes & Management of Therapeutic Interventions: Here, you’ll develop your understanding of disease processes, and improve your diagnostic and clinical decision-making skills for determining, implementing and evaluating evidence-based therapeutic pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions. (This unit is undertaken by students as an alternative pathway to the non-medical prescribing route). Advanced Practice Portfolio: This unit encourages self-direction and personal responsibility for professional development as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner, using nationally-recognised advanced practice criteria against which you will benchmark your advanced practice.Throughout the course, you will collect evidence of your advanced role development that will demonstrate achievement of generic advanced practice competencies, as well as more speciality-based one within your own practice area. An additional aspect of this unit focuses on leadership and business acumen, within the context of your advanced practice role. The unit will culminate in you producing a personal, professional portfolio that spans the whole two year course, drawing together all elements of your developing advanced practice role, alongside academic development at Masters level. Once you’ve completed this course, you’ll be able to undertake the top-up MA Advanced Practice programme, which will further enhance your leadership and management and service development skills. This Master's programme will provide you with the opportunity to undertake a service improvement project, aimed at developing patient-centred care and improving service delivery within your own organisation. Programme specification Programme specifications provide definitive records of the University's taught degrees in line with Quality Assurance Agency requirements. Every taught course leading to a BU Award has a programme specification which describes its aims, structure, content and learning outcomes, plus the teaching, learning and assessment methods used. Download the programme specification for PGDip Advanced Nurse Practitioner. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the programme specification, the information is liable to change to take advantage of exciting new approaches to teaching and learning as well as developments in industry. If you have been unable to locate the programme specification for the course you are interested in, it will be available as soon as the latest version is ready. Alternatively please contact us for assistance.