• education
• Emergency Medicine
• advanced practitioner
• Staff Development

Emergency care is under significant pressure around the world with increased demand and case complexity and severe limitations on physical and human resources. Meeting demand will need a renewed focus on securing an appropriate workforce. The development of a multiprofessional workforce under the supervision of a trained emergency medicine specialist both enriches the skills and experience in the team and maximises the capacity of the department to provide safe quality care. Emergency care (EC) advanced practice training has developed rapidly in the last 10 years. Advanced practitioners are fully trained practitioners from a variety of professional backgrounds who undertake additional ‘on the job’ training to acquire advanced skills and become independent practitioners in a specified scope of practice (curriculum). They use these clinical advanced skills as well as demonstrating capabilities in the other three pillars of advanced practice: leadership and management, education and research. The introduction in 2015 of a formal credential, awarded by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), offered a standardised national curriculum to guide a locally delivered training programme.1 Credentialing requires submission of evidence at the culmination of training. These local programmes have been enormously successful in some areas of the UK but in other areas are yet to be developed. Advanced clinical practitioners (ACPs) are increasingly seen as one solution to delivering consistent competent clinical care in the ED so …