Care practitioner role appears, working across traditional professional boundaries

As more complex treatments and care are given in the community, there will be a need for specialist knowledge and a need to work across traditional professional boundaries. Bringing together the two, the role of care practitioner offers a potential solution to increases in demand for services.

In order to provide greater flexibility to the workforce, organizations may employ highly skilled specialist generic workers, or care practitioners; this is not a contradiction.

As more complex treatments and care are given in the community, there is a need for specialist knowledge in the cases of, for example, heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma and diabetes.

However, these specialists also need to be generic, as they will need to work across traditional professional boundaries (nurse, doctor, therapist and social worker) in order to help provide the best quality of care for the patient. The idea of the care practitioner, therefore, is to bridge the gap between acute and community care more effectively, and thereby encourage integration of care. It is a response towards meeting the likely increased demand, with the possible implication of sustaining more demand as new combinations of services could be provided.

As with nursing, care practitioners could be qualified at both registered and assistant practitioner levels. Pathway redesign work, such as that developed by the CfWI in its Older People pathway tool, has suggested this as a potential solution. Such roles could be designed to specialise in rapid response, early intervention, and rehabilitation.

Introducing care practitioners would impact on supply; if care practitioners were able to fulfil some of the functions currently carried out by nurses and doctors, then the overall shape of the workforce would need to change accordingly. With more people likely to have long-term conditions in future, the idea of the care practitioner may be a solution to increases in demand for services.

Some of the information in this section is provided by stakeholders and expert groups, and does not necessarily represent the views of the CfWI.