On May 25 2022, at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) meeting in Derry, Northern Ireland, the Council members approved the standards for the Community Specialist Practice Qualification (SPQ) and the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing qualification (SCPHN). This followed almost 3 years of research, engagement and consultation with the profession and the public on the much needed revision of the existing standards – and in particular the SPQ standards which were over two decades old.
The Queen's Nursing Institute (QNI) and several other organisations, including the Royal College of Nursing, campaigned for the SPQ standards to include field-specific standards, following the structure of the SCPHN standards, which comprise core and field-specific standards (for health visiting, school nursing, occupational health nursing and public health nursing). The campaign was partially successful; the SPQ has annotations for the intended field of practice, but these are not supported by NMC field-specific standards.
So, the QNI will be setting the standards for the specialist fields of practice in the community, to complement the NMC core SPQ standards and to provide a national benchmark for universities and service providers, against which to judge the suitability of the content and assessment of the SPQ programme at a local level.
In short, the QNI standards will provide the opportunity for the university to demonstrate that they have met the nationally agreed standards (what the nurse needs to know and be able to do) for all fields of practice.
For example, the SPQ in general practice nursing (GPNSPQ) will have, in addition to a core set of NMC standards which must be mapped to the university programme, a QNI field-specific set of standards for GPNSPQ which are specific to working at an advanced level of practice as a GPN, leading and managing a team of regulated and unregulated team members in the context of general practice.
The QNI standards will be written using the structure of the four pillars of advanced practice, as we have done for the last eight years in our standards work (QNI/QNI Scotland, 2017). In this way we are able to demonstrate the advanced level of practice at which those who have the GPNSPQ are working and we believe that this will be enormously helpful to the work the NMC is now going to embark on: to explore the regulation of advanced practice.
We are delighted that in England, Skills for Care have published the Primary care & general practice nursing career & core capabilities framework (Skills for Health, 2022). Within this framework, the GPNSPQ is recognised as reflecting an advanced level of practice, equal in terms of level of practice to advanced clinical practitioner (ACP) and advanced nurse practitioner (ANP) but with the addition of the leadership and management capability for the team responsibilities of the role.
GPNSPQ also maintains reference to the term nurse – the profession we are proud to be a member of, with our unique knowledge and skills reflected by the registered nurse title. Working at an advanced level of clinical practice in a specialist field of nursing, while leading and managing a team of regulated and unregulated staff and managing the risk of a nurse-led service is reflected in both the core NMC standards and will be reflected in the QNI's GPN standards which are being developed now.
The QNI has had a very successful history of setting standards in specialist fields of practice in the community, including district nursing, community children's nursing, general practice nursing and community learning disability nursing. We will be adding several others to these including homeless and inclusion health nursing and adult social care nursing. The joy of having the range of nurse-led services reflected in the SPQ all learning together in a university cannot be underestimated; it is where relationships are built and where the deep understanding of each other's services is developed for the benefit of the populations served.
I cannot think of a better way of celebrating the QNI anniversary of 135 years than creating the standards for the range of nurse-led services in our communities; it is where we started 135 years ago and our responsibilities for setting and upholding the standards of education as a professional organisation endure.