A service evaluation of Advanced Clinical Practitioners’ experiences of emergency redeployment to intensive care during the Covid-19 health crisis.

Aims:
To explore the experiences of ACPs (and trainee ACPs) being redeployed from their current role to intensive care during the Covid 19 pandemic.
Design:
A service evaluation design, using an online survey. All ACPs that were redeployed to the intensive care unit during March-July 2020 were invited to participate via a purposive sampling technique. A six-step model of thematic analysis was used, underpinned by a middle range transition theory.

Results:
26 ACPs responded.
Four key themes emerged: Organisational culture, mixed emotions, experience level and social interaction.
Conclusions:
There were mixed experiences of redeployment and the range of emotions could be due to several key factors. Prior ICU experience could produce a positive experience for staff members as they felt more confident to return to the role. Concurrently, staff previously left this role for a reason (e.g. did not enjoy working on ICU) therefore on return due to redeployment ACPs may already have negative connotations linked to this work environment so this may have influenced their answers. More experienced ACPs may have found the transition easier as they were better equipped to deal with change management and working in different teams. Social support and interaction largely influenced whether the ACPs had a positive or negative experience of redeployment as did opinion and experience of management support.
Recommendations:
• Further large-scale research into the experiences of redeployed ACPs.
• Improved organisational pandemic planning.
• Proposal of compulsory rotation for ACP staff to improve experience level.