GP practices across England are struggling to recruit much-needed nurses because they are unable to match salaries given elsewhere, an exclusive report has warned.
The new white paper unveiled today by our publisher Cogora has laid bare the scale of the workforce crisis across general practice and what this means for the role of nurses in these settings.
Penned by the editor in chief of our sister title Pulse – and launched with the Rebuild General Practice campaign – the Cogora General Practice Workforce White Paper surveyed more than 600 distinct practices in England, and 2,000 healthcare professionals in general practice and community pharmacy.
It will be officially launching with an event in Parliament today, bringing together MPs with key stakeholders from across general practice and nursing to find out more about the pressing workforce situation.
Survey findings within the white paper suggest there is a registered nurse vacancy rate of 23% across practices in England, as well as a 16% shortfall of GPs and 32% shortfall of pharmacists.
The report pins much of the situation on core underfunding, as practices struggling financially are unable to offer competitive salaries or pay rises, and also cannot update their premises to hold more staff.
According to the white paper, practice managers and GP partners are finding registered nurses ‘particularly difficult to recruit’ – largely because of funding constraints that mean practices cannot keep up with pay levels given in other settings, especially in secondary care.
This was an issue also identified by our General Practice Nursing Manifesto last year – which urged the government to ensure practice nurses had the same pay, terms and conditions as their secondary care colleagues.
One nurse team lead in Dorset said there are ‘limited numbers of nurses able to afford to come out of hospital even though they would like to, as our practice cannot afford anywhere near the level of pay in secondary care’.
‘Some of the very large, multiple-site practices seem to be able to afford a higher wage, although I understand from colleagues that working in them carries its own difficulties,’ the nurse added.
A practice manager in Blackpool also warned they could not afford to match salaries for nurses.
‘We currently have four practice nurses; they do the bulk of our chronic disease management and are worth their weight in gold,’ they said.
‘Nurses are particularly difficult to recruit, mainly because the local out-of-hours provider pays significantly more than we can ever offer.’
Meanwhile, a GP partner in the West Midlands said it had made its nursing associate role redundant and that it had ‘not been able to pick up the slack with any other roles’.
Despite wanting more nurses, more GPs and a pharmacist, this GP partner said the incoming National Insurance rises could mean more of its staff are made redundant and that they were also unable to offer current staff any pay rise.
They added that they were in a worse position now ‘in terms of numbers, equivalents and what we can offer’, than it was almost 10 years ago.
The report points to findings from our exclusive survey from last year, including that half of practice nurses did not receive a pay rise in 2024 and that only a third saw themselves working in general practice in five years’ time.
In the coming weeks, a new Nursing in Practice series will explore the findings of the Cogora white paper in more detail, including concerns around ARRS, recruitment and retention, and that nurses are becoming a sometimes-forgotten force within the general practice team.
