Band 8a Acp

22.5 hours a week

We have a fantastic opportunity for you to join the Complex Breathlessness Service operating out of the state-of-the-art Community Diagnostic Centre recently opened at Quayside House, Gloucester. We are recruiting a team of experienced and enthusiastic individuals to establish a Complex Breathlessness Pathway for Gloucestershire which aims to provide an excellent patient experience while undergoing diagnostic testing and improve patients long term health outcomes.

The role welcomes the interest of an ACP or a Trainee ACP including nurses, paramedics, clinical scientists etc. As an advanced clinical practitioner you will work within a diagnostic team focussed on the high quality assessment of patients with complex breathlessness with an aim to identify and diagnose their condition. The role will have close working relationships with specialist teams and proactively input into an MDT where diagnosis is not clear. You will lead the team to work alongside the acute and community teams to offer each patient the most appropriate onward package of care. The role will liaise effectively with a wide variety of other stakeholders including primary care and voluntary sector organisations. You will have a high level of expertise in respiratory, cardiology or diagnosis of complex clinical presentations, and be flexible in your approach and innovative in your methods.

The ACP will provide clinical leadership to the Complex Breathlessness Team within the Community Diagnostic Hub. You will provide an advanced level of expert clinical input into the diagnostic complex breathlessness pathway and ensure that evidence
- based practice is inherent in all aspects of assessment and treatment.

You will work as an integral part of the multidisciplinary team, working closely with acute and community practitioners, taking referrals from Primary and Secondary Care to review patients with complex breathlessness symptoms, providing an in-depth assessment of their condition and developing a comprehensive onward referral or management plan as appropriate. It is not essential to be an independent prescriber for this role however it would be an exciting element that we would like to include within the model where possible.

The team will initially be working 3 days per week in Quayside House to deliver the Complex Breathlessness Pathway. This role will spend a majority of it’s time working clinically but there is expectation to also dedicate time to service performance and evaluation and to work with ICB colleagues on service improvement and transformation projects. There will be an expectation of flexibility in this workload split as the service embeds and develops.

The Complex Breathlessness Pathway is a new initiative which has been recommended nationally as best practice and locally endorsed by our Respiratory and Cardiology specialist Teams.

This role will be employed by the acute trust and will be based at Quayside House in Gloucester. The role will work closely with clinical teams across all Gloucester Hospital Sites and Community Heart Failure nurses employed by the community health and care trust.

We are fortunate that Gloucestershire has a single acute trust, and single community provider. Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust operates hospitals on our two main sites in Cheltenham and Gloucester, and we're one of the largest NHS Trusts in the country. We have a workforce of 8,000+ staff across both sites.

You will be supported by clinical leads, operational leads and transformation leads within the trust medical teams and physiology department alongside the ICB to develop and evaluate the model.

Please see the attached job description and person specification for more information on this vacancy.