A day in the life of an Advanced Nurse Practitioner

Advanced Nurse Practitioners are Registered Nurses who have done extra training and academic qualifications to be able to examine, assess, make diagnoses, treat, prescribe and make referrals for patients who present with undiagnosed/undifferentiated problems.

My day starts at 07:00, I arrive at work and in the mornings, I am based in the same office as the care navigation team taking calls to make appointments. This enables me to give clinical advice to patients and to ensure patients are booked for the correct appointment with the correct clinician.  For the first hour, I will mainly spend my time answering phone queries, checking and filing blood results and dealing with e- consults.

 My main role during the rest of the day is part of the ‘Go – to Doctor team’.  I will work alongside one of the GPs in dealing with all the same day emergency appointments, dealing with urgent phone calls and tasks received from other professionals and agencies regarding patients. During 8:00am – 12:00noon, I can deal with up to 30 phone calls, to and from patients and to other departments.

Usually from 12:00noon -2:00pm I perform home visits for patients that are unable to leave their house. The number of visits varies every day, but sometimes I can be out of the building for longer. 

On return, I usually grab some lunch and catch up with the GP I am working with so we can plan the afternoon and how we can best see the patients that need a face to face review. 

In the afternoon, I will generally review patients in surgery whilst trying to deal with any further queries and make referrals that are required. Again, I can have up to 10-20 further contacts with patients, usually over the phone.

Before I finish at 5, I check my emails and ensure I have no outstanding issues left for that day, file any further blood results that have arrived that day and ensure that GP I am working with is ok and able to manage the rest of the workload. On an average day, the ‘Go-to Doctor team will have had up to 70 contacts with patients.