It will be ‘impossible’ to recruit general practice nurses (GPNs) at the scale needed without changes to the GP contract, a nursing leader has warned.
Chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), Professor Nicola Ranger was speaking to GPs and primary care network (PCN) leaders this week when she warned of the poor terms and conditions faced by practice nurses.
‘When you look at the terms and conditions of general practice nurses, they still do not match the NHS,’ she told attendees of our sister title’s Pulse PCN Live event.
Pointing to the recent findings of an RCN survey – which showed almost a third of GPNs were still waiting for a pay rise for 2024/25 – Professor Ranger noted that only 20% of those in England had received the full 6% pay award.
And she added that ‘a general practice nurse doesn’t get sick pay, usually, and doesn’t get maternity leave’.
‘So, there is something when you talk about the contracts for GPs, the way of working, to have that real sense of team for nursing teams, there has got to be something very different that GP practices and the contract needs to respect,’ Professor Ranger said.
‘Otherwise, it is going to be very, very difficult to scale up the nursing partnerships that we need in primary care.’
Achieving the government’s ‘three shifts’ – from hospital to community, analogue to digital and sickness to prevention – would also be ‘very difficult’ to achieve without ‘brilliant nurses’, she said.
‘I think there is usually very, very strong relationships between GPs and their general practice nurse, both at specialist level and advanced level, but my words of real caution is we need to sort out the contract, because otherwise it’s going to be impossible to recruit nurses at the scale that GP practices need,’ she added.
Earlier this month, the RCN told Nursing in Practice that pay ‘instability’ was a significant risk to GPN recruitment and retention and could also lead to more people visiting A&E to access care.
This came after it was confirmed GPNs will be added to the additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS) under the GP contract for 2025/26.
‘UK has got to invest in nursing’
More widely, Professor Ranger told attendees that ‘nursing is in a significant crisis in the UK’.
Applications to study nursing continue to decline, she warned, and the UK continues to rely heavily on international recruitment.
‘The UK has absolutely got to invest in nursing. It is a great job. It’s a brilliant profession,’ Professor Ranger added.
‘We are the group of people that are the lifeblood of many organisations. But when it comes to our pay, we’re weighted at the bottom.’
