Advanced clinical practitioners' untapped potential to become managers

Background Jones et al (2022) states that experienced staff should be more present as clinical managers within healthcare. Leadership and management is one of the four pillars of Advanced Practice (Health Education England, 2017), which suggests that Advanced Clinical Practitioners (ACPs) would be well positioned to take on these roles. Aim To explore whether the management responsibilities of ACPs support role transition to clinical management. Methods This mixed-method narrative literature review uses reflective thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2020) and a deductive approach to generate themes based on the six critical tasks of a manager defined by Jones et al (2022) to the four pillars of advanced clinical practice. MMAT (Hong et al, 2018) assessed the quality of existing research. Findings Eleven papers of varying quality were identified. Previous research suggests that although ACPs can demonstrate they already have the skills to take on management roles there is limited evidence of this is practice. Conclusion ACPs have the clinical background and training to transition into management roles simpler than staff without this pre-requisite. Nevertheless, there remains insufficient evidence that this is happening in practice. By promoting and encouraging this role transition ACPs could use their breadth of skills to become future managers.