Impact of advanced autonomous non-medical practitioners in emergency care: protocol for a scoping study

Emergency care services are looking for new models of care delivery to deal with changing patient demographics and increased pressures. It has been suggested that advanced non-medical practitioners might be valuable for delivering such new models of care. However, it is not clear what the impact of the deployment of advanced non-medical practitioners in emergency care is. This scoping study addresses the following research question: What is known from the literature about the different types of impact of the deployment of advanced (autonomous) non-medical practitioners in emergency care?

A scoping study will be undertaken to examine and map the impact of the deployment of advanced non-medical practitioners in emergency care. The scoping study follows the methodology proposed by Arksey and O'Malley. Searches will be carried out on databases of peer-reviewed literature and other sources to systematically identify and characterise the literature. Papers will be screened using a 2-stage process to identify the most relevant literature. Papers will be screened by title and abstract, followed by full-text review. Data abstraction and synthesis will be performed using a narrative thematic analysis.

We will communicate the findings to Health Education England, NHS Improvement and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine through existing links provided by members of the project team. We anticipate that the findings will also be of interest to other similar organisations internationally. By identifying gaps in the research literature, we anticipate that the study will generate recommendations for informing future high-quality research studies about the impact of advanced non-medical practitioners in emergency care as well as in other settings. The research findings will be submitted for publication to relevant peer-reviewed journals as well as professional magazines. The scoping study uses only previously published material, and does not require ethical review.