Advanced Clinical Practice - Postgraduate Certificate

The PG Cert in Advanced Clinical Practice is designed to expand existing professional knowledge and to produce high quality evidence-based practitioners, who are better positioned to develop their individual disciplines as well as the wider health agenda. This programme offers students the opportunity to critically examine and reflect on their own practice and to implement mechanisms of change to enhance current practice.

This highly flexible programme can be individually tailored to your professional needs. Rather than a prescribed course of study, students can select modules that support their needs, ranging from project management, lean thinking and leadership to intercultural care and applied psychology, with many other options in between. In addition to these electives, you will complete a core module of either research methods or evidence-based practice, to equip you with the knowledge needed to be an evidence-based practitioner. Among the elective offerings is the Independent Learning Modules which provide the option for you to put forward a specialist topic and receive one-to-one supervision to develop your skills/knowledge in relation to this topic. The output you produce from this module can be tailored to your professional needs: e.g. a clinical guideline, an evidence summary, a mini dissertation or a suite of resources, amongst other things. You may choose to progress your professional development via the Master of Science in Advanced Healthcare Practice, which follows the same practitioner-focused course design.

In short, this programme equips graduates with the tools to excel in developing their professional knowledge in an area meaningful to them.

Objectives: Graduates will obtain in-depth knowledge of an area of Health Sciences to apply to their professional practice and will develop skills to enhance their work as an evidence-based practitioner. Graduates will reflect critically on their own and others’ learning styles and practice.

Programme Aims:

On successful completion of the programme, graduates will be able to:

• Discuss professional issues relating to the provision of healthcare services
• Examine the different sectors of patients/clients, service providers and models of service, and their differing needs
• Source, critically appraise and synthesise the most up to date research
• Acquire an advanced level of clinical reasoning and critical thinking
• Develop advanced level assessment and identification of service need in the student’s area of clinical practice
• Integrate research knowledge with clinical expertise and patient preference to establish the means of providing cost-effective, high quality clinical services​