Urgent Care Practitioner (Exp Para Practitioner/Nurse Practitioner)

South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAmb) has a vision to 'support our staff to provide a caring, high quality and efficient urgent and emergency care service to our communities'. We are rated 'Good' for care by the Care Quality Commission and while the other areas under their most recent report require improvement, our aim is to continually improve and to reach outstanding across all areas of the Trust.

Our 4,000+ workforce provide services to 4.9m people across Kent, Surrey, Sussex and North East Hampshire. We handle over 1 million calls to 999 and 1 million calls to NHS 111 every year.

Urgent Care Practitioner (Experienced Paramedic Practitioner / Experienced Nurse Practitioner)

• Full time / Part time / bank positions available.
• Vacancies available in Gillingham, Kent or Crawley, West Sussex
• Telephone Clinical Assessment opportunity providing senior clinical advice to patients across 999 & 111 services

Are you an experienced and clinically driven Paramedic or Nurse Practitioner looking for a new challenge to utilise your existing extensive clinical experience in assessing and consulting patients remotely who contact 999 or 111?

An opportunity has arisen for Experienced Paramedic or Nurse Practitioners to join our Integrated Care (999 & 111) clinical team, based across the South East region. This is an exciting time to join South East Coast Ambulance Service, as we continue integrating patient access to urgent and emergency care.

Main duties of the job

As an Urgent Care Practitioner (UCP) you will provide advanced clinical assessment and signposting, through telephone consultation, to patients who have contacted the 999 /111 service.

You will also provide clinical advice, support and leadership to the 999 Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) multi-disciplinary team, including Emergency Medical Advisors (Call Handlers), Paramedics, Nurses & Mental Health Practitioners.

Furthermore, you will provide clinical support across the Trust's wider Integrated Urgent Care (IUC) clinical team within NHS 111 - including Health Advisors (Call Handlers), Dental Nurses, Paediatric Nurses, Palliative Care Nurses, Pharmacists, Midwives and GPs.

In addition to supporting the on-site IUC clinical team, you will also be available to provide clinical support and advice to Healthcare Professionals within the community, including ambulance clinicians, community nursing teams, allied health professionals and care home social care staff.

You will need a proven track record of extensive clinical experience working across a variety of primary care and urgent & emergency settings, with well-honed patient consultation skills including excellent telephone communication skills, be self-motivated and able to manage your own workload.

About us

The role requires:

• Permanent full-time contracts
• 24-hour rotas that involve unsocial hours working due to the delivery of patients presenting through 999, with a focus on the out of hours period providing care for patients presenting through 111.
• Successfully passing a two-week training course which will be held at Crawley HQ.

Please note, this is a 7-day per week role and there is a requirement to work a variety of shifts. Unsocial hours is payable in addition to the salary quoted, dependent upon working pattern.

Training - 2 weeks full time Pathways Clinical Consultation System (PaCCS) course including mentoring on the use of systems and ways of working.

PaCCS is an NHS product that provides an aide memoir for clinicians performing remote clinical consultations, within a consultation rather than an algorithmic format, for that reason experienced clinicians are required to utilise extensive clinical knowledge and experience in assessing the patient whilst the system documents clinical findings and allows onward electronic referral to a wide range of outcomes.

Job responsibilities

You will need to be a registered Paramedic or Nurse (Adult) with significant experience of clinical practice and qualifications and evidence relevant to specialist practice in the field of primary care and urgent & emergency care.

You will have operated in an autonomous capacity within a primary and urgent care setting, including having responsibility for the assessment and treatment of on the day patients within primary care, such as working within a Duty Team, working within an Urgent Treatment Centre with a wide range of injury but more commonly illness exposure or an Emergency Department in which your scope of practice involves autonomous care with discharge rights for a wide range of urgent care presentations.

You will have sound assessment and decision-making skills, the ability to plan and prioritise clinical workloads and ability to negotiate appropriate treatment and referral strategies.

Excellent communication skills and the ability to work under pressure are also prerequisites for this role.

Person Specification

Experience

• Higher Education Award including: Specialist Practice Diploma in Primary and Urgent Care or equivalent. Working towards Advanced Clinical Practice pathway which must evidence completion of an Advanced clinical assessment and reasoning module.
• Evidence of a minimum of two years' in an autonomous role: In primary care (Must include duty team/on day team working) Urgent (UTC/ED/SDEC) care. Acute Frailty response teams (Urgent Community Response teams).
• Experience of telephone triage or consultation.
• Knowledge of clinical governance, audit or safeguarding frameworks.

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.