Trainee Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Pete Gilligan, has recently returned from a trip organised by the University of Huddersfield to Canada, where he experienced what Advanced Clinical Practice is like internationally.

Pete comes from a physiotherapy background and now works as part of the Frailty Team, covering both Frailty SDEC and Urgent Community Response Team (UCR) in Halifax. He is also a current student on the MSc Advanced Clinical Practice course at the University of Huddersfield, who funded the trip.

Pete said: "This was a real eye-opening experience for me. I learnt that despite the fact that the profession has been established much longer in North America, they still only have it available to nurses and that the UK is the only country that allows allied health professionals to develop towards working at an advanced practice level.

"There was the opportunity to visit a community centre that manages patients with established drug abuse problems as well as meeting with a nurse practitioner that is a provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID). The MAID provision is something that we do not offer in the UK so this felt very far from what I am used to working in the UK.

"What I have brought back from the trip is a much better appreciation of the fact that with many professions being able to work at this advanced level, it exposes the patients to multiple points of view with regards to their management."