Health Education England have been conducting a series of seminars on MAPs roles.  These have included presentations that present Advanced Critical Care Practitioners as MAPs who are categorised as “dependent clinicians” who “provide patient care under the supervision of a senior doctor”.

This has led to much debate on social media.  We therefore thought it important to share what AAPE UK stated in our response to the MAPs consultation held at the end of 2017:

“AAPE UK consider that it has been an error of judgement to include ACCP’s within this consultation under the umbrella of “Medical Associate Professions”. There are hundreds of Advanced Practitioners across the UK who work in Critical Care and ITU settings who are demonstrating safe and effective advanced level clinical practice in their direct patient care, work within teams and in evaluations and research.    Only a very small proportion of these have been opted to join the voluntary register with FCIM, many citing that they wanted a postgraduate education that developed them beyond the narrow medicalised focus of the FCIM ACCP curriculum.  

These ACCPs recognise that advanced practice extends beyond a “medical model dependent focus” as advocated by Health Education England in their recently published Multi-professional Advanced Clinical Practice Framework for England (November 2017) and the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland equivalents.

There are other advanced practice roles such as Advanced Clinical Practitioner (Royal College of Medicine) that have not been included in this consultation so we are unclear why the ACCP has been chosen in isolation”. 

AAPE UK has previously raised this discrepancy with HEE and will do so again next week at the HEE ACP Operational working group meeting.  We are concerned that the association between  ACCP’s and MAPs will perpetuate and reinforce the alignment of advanced practice with medicine which many of us have been trying to move away from for many years.