There are new resources available from the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) designed to support those working at advanced levels of practice — particularly relevant for teams within general practice.
Why this matters for your practice
As general practice continues to evolve, many teams are now working within multidisciplinary models, with clinicians operating at increasingly advanced and autonomous levels.
This creates real opportunities, but also brings important responsibilities around:
- Scope of practice
- Clinical supervision
- Safe delegation
- Training and competency
- Accountability within complex teams
These are all areas that sit directly within CQC expectations, particularly when demonstrating safe and effective care.
The HCPC resources are designed to support:
- Experienced registrants working at advanced levels
- Practice leaders and managers responsible for governance and oversight
They provide clarity on:
- Defining and working within an appropriate scope of practice
- Ensuring effective supervision in autonomous roles
- Approaching delegation safely within multidisciplinary teams
- Maintaining standards while working across blended roles
Bringing this into your CQC approach
From a CQC perspective, this guidance is highly relevant.
Practices need to be able to clearly demonstrate that they:
- Recognise the level each team member is working at
- Provide appropriate clinical supervision aligned to that level
- Ensure the right training, competency and support is in place
- Have clear systems for safe delegation and decision-making
In reality, this often comes down to how well you can evidence what is already happening in your practice.
Having a structured way to:
- Define roles across your team
- Capture and review supervision arrangements
- Identify any gaps in training or competency
- Show how decisions are made within your multidisciplinary team
can make this much clearer — both internally and when responding to inspection.
What this means in practice
For GP partners and practice managers, this is a good opportunity to sense-check:
- Are advanced roles in your practice clearly defined?
- Is supervision proportionate to the level of autonomy?
- Do you have clear oversight of training and competency?
- Can you evidence safe delegation within your team?
These are the types of questions that often come up during inspection — and being able to confidently answer them makes a real difference.
A practical next step
You may want to:
- Review your current advanced roles against this guidance
- Reflect on whether supervision and training align with those roles
- Make sure you can clearly evidence how this is being managed
Even a short review can strengthen both patient safety and your CQC confidence.
Want support turning this into clear, inspection-ready evidence?
If you want a simple way to map roles, supervision, training and delegation into a clear, structured approach that aligns with CQC expectations, you can explore how Harmony CQC supports practices to do exactly that.
It’s designed to help you move from “we’re doing this” to “we can evidence this clearly and confidently.”