Community Specialist Practitioner (General Practice Nursing) Postgraduate Diploma

The Community Specialist Practice Qualification (SPQ) programme is designed to equip postgraduates with the skills required for community specialist practice and there are four pathways to choose from: District Nursing, General Practice Nursing, Adult Social Care Nursing and Community Children’s Nursing.

The GPN role is constantly developing and currently as more care management is delivered from a primary care perspective, this will continue.

As practitioners in general practice deliver care across the age spectrum, this role offers an opportunity to deliver specialist and high-quality care across a wide spectrum of presentations and stages of health, wellbeing, and illness.

The role provides continuity of care, often negating the requirements to seek medical appointments, and delivers care in a collaborative approach with patients and their carer’s and/or families as appropriate.

The course will offer you the opportunity to develop within a stimulating and multi-disciplinary learning environment, on a personal and professional level, resulting in high quality, evidenced based care provision for your patients. It will offer you the opportunity to expand your leadership skills and be confident in-service improvement developments.

Each pathway has a distinct approach to its delivery; however, all share a more practice focused delivery, with a 60/40 split between clinical practice and protected learning time at Northumbria University respectively.

This ensures that the specialist field of practice focuses on the specialist skills required for the pathway and is evident in the optional modules and as pathway-focused learning and teaching across all modules.

Students also benefit from integrated learning with fellow community specialist practitioner students. This programme has been innovatively designed and coproduced with a vast range of stakeholders from all pathway routes in both health and social care, to truly reflect contemporary specialist practice, need and service provision requirements.

Throughout this Postgraduate Diploma you will experience a range of creative and challenging learning opportunities and different environments. This will enable you to grow, personally and professionally, within safe and supportive spaces.

You will benefit from a newly developed curriculum, which reflects the contemporary clinical and socio-political landscape and collaborative working of Specialist Community Practice, meeting current professional and regulatory requirements.

The NMC (2022) Standards for post-registration programmes will also be met, ensuring the completion of a period of experience of sufficient length to have consolidated pre-registration outcomes and to gain a deeper understanding in specialist practice.

All modules and their assessments are designed to help you synthesise contemporary theory with clinical practice, as well as to identify gaps between your current and desired performance to develop further.

Progress review meetings will ensure that your progress is reviewed and that opportunities for learning are identified and maximised both in theory and practice. These will be supported by your Academic Assessor and Practice Assessor and Practice Supervisor(s).