Making an impact. Apprentice Christina’s story

A student is starting to make an impact for her patients before she has even completed her apprenticeship with University of Northampton (UON).

Christina Guevara – originally from Scotland but now living in Bletchley – is a qualified paramedic and currently works for East London NHS Foundation Trust. She’s also about the finish the University of Northampton’s Advanced Clinical Practitioner Apprenticeship.

Apprenticeships offer a ‘earn while you learn’ route into higher education. Apprentices study for a higher-level qualification and gain professional recognition whilst earning a full-time salary and gaining invaluable workplace experience. Following a three-day visit at the end of last year, Ofsted gave the University a ‘Good’ rating overall for its seven apprenticeship programmes.

After completing the Advanced Clinical Practitioner Apprenticeship, Christina will have the knowledge and skills to independently manage clinical care whilst demonstrating expertise within their scope of practice.

Christina talks about why she decided to take the Apprenticeship with UON: “I specialise in women’s health providing health clinics within a GP surgery where we advise about such things as contraception and menopause.

“Management falls within my role and I want to do more to make the service I run as impactful as possible, which means taking that next step up to help influence this evolution.

“Earning and learning as an apprentice has flipped the whole work process on its head because I have had protected time every week from my employers. I’ve been lucky that my employer has a very healthy, established apprenticeship network and they have been incredibly supportive.”

Christina’s time studying the ACP has enabled her to tie together two strands of health provision – clinical practice and management – more seamlessly. She continues: “For the educating and influencing others module what I have learned has crossed over so much with a lot of the Quality Improvement (QI) work that I was already doing. I was able to bring in lots of things from the ACP course into our QI meetings and for the different projects that we were working on.

“I’ve also had the opportunity to present at Board meetings meaning I saw a completely different aspect of the Trust. Years before, I never thought I would get involved in that side of NHS work and that I enjoy it.”

Taking the Advanced Clinical Practitioner course at UON has helped Christina reflect on new ways to better support her patients. She concludes: “I think about this on a bigger scale now and there have been lots of parallels between what I’ve learned, what I do for my job and where I see myself being in the future. I was able to target the things that I liked with my practice and focus on that and what my patients needed.

“As an apprentice, you get so much more exposure to different things so my advice for anyone considering taking this course is to go for it because it opens up so many doors.”