Dylan Woodhead
Advanced Clinical Practitioner (Masters) Degree Apprentice, Connect Health
Meet Dylan, an Advanced Clinical Practitioner (Masters) apprentice at Connect Health, who recently completed his Quality Improvement Project, making a positive impact on patient care in his service and opening up opportunities for personal and career development.
He shared with us insights into his apprenticeship journey, highlighting the skills he’s developed and explaining why he chose to study at Manchester Met. Read more about Dylan’s experience as an ACP apprentice below.
Why the apprenticeship was the right choice for me
I’d worked as a physiotherapist for around 10 years, before moving back to Manchester and moving back into Musculoskeletal (MSK) physiotherapy with Connect Health. I was doing a Diploma in MSK Medicine when the opportunity came up to study on the Advanced Clinical Practitioner (Masters) apprenticeship (ACP), and it just seemed like a great fit for me to progress my clinical skills and fill in my gaps in knowledge.
I did consider other options for gaining the ACP qualification, such as through the portfolio route, but with the excellent optional MSK modules available at Manchester Met, I felt that the benefits of the degree apprenticeship outweighed the time commitments and other challenges of the portfolio route.
My experience of studying the degree apprenticeship at Manchester Met
Genuinely, across the board everything has just been really well organised and well structured, and the tutors have been amazing.
One of the biggest benefits of being on the apprenticeship is that you know that your learning has been planned and scaffolded, and at Manchester Met, they’ve got a really strong programme in place with expert tuition that is responding to the needs of the NHS.
I enjoyed every day that I spent on campus, particularly benefitting from the excellent facilities at the Brooks Building. One of the highlights of the course for me was studying with colleagues from different specialties and different working environments across the NHS, and learning about their contexts and needs.
The impact of my Quality Improvement Project on patient care
At Connect Health we conduct quarterly audits, and one of these audits is titled “Procedures of Limited Clinical Value (PLCV)” – auditing our performance against the national EBI programme criteria. It’s important that referrals are made effectively for these procedures, getting patients to the right setting at the right time in order to improve the quality of care, reduce risk of harm, minimise variation in service provision and optimise the use of resources to ensure any money saved is spent on more effective treatments. The audit I completed within my service involved four wrist and hand conditions, looking at clinician compliance data over two years. I established that the compliance rates were 70%, which was below our internal target of 95% and highlighted the service I work in as an outlier relative to the other services in Connect.
I decided to focus my Quality Improvement Project (QIP) for the apprenticeship on raising our average compliance rate. I used the Model for Improvement Quality Improvement (QI) tool which involved four PDSA cycles and raised compliance rates to an overall average of 86% (achieving a success rate of 100% over the last two cycles and sustaining this to the end of the project). I achieved this through a range of change interventions, including running clinician training sessions to raise awareness, creating a bespoke referral flowchart diagram which was rolled out to the team, and creating a quiz to assess clinician understanding. The orthopaedic referral process for these procedures has now been successfully sustained and embedded within my clinical setting, and I have been invited to participate in the next Greater Manchester Steering Group meeting, where we will review related regional guidance policies, using my work to shape this.
My career next steps
Without the QIP, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to speak to some of the Clinical Leads and senior NHS staff that I did while I was undertaking the project. The QIP gave me the opportunity to promote good practice in a structured and evidenced way within my service. I facilitated a QI training session at one of the Connect Health National Study Days and have been invited to be part of the next National Audit of PLCV, which is something I would not have had the opportunity to do were it not for the QIP. It really has raised my visibility within my service and beyond, and I’ve also found that I have a passion for Quality Improvement that I am keen to carry with me as I move forward in my career.
I can honestly say that the Advanced Clinical Practitoner (Masters) apprenticeship at Manchester Met has opened so many doors and given me a new focus and new passion. I can recommend it wholeheartedly.