General practice nursing: revisited and reinvigorated

Abstract

For many years general practice nurses (GPNs) have seen themselves as the Cinderellas of the nursing profession. While the focus has been to provide more care in the community, there has been very little investment attempting to address the challenges of recruiting and retaining this element of the primary care workforce. There have been isolated examples of robust GPN development, but for a newly-qualifying nurse, who sees primary care as their future career, the options are very limited and funding sources unreliable. Publication of the long-awaited District Nursing and General Practice Nursing Education and Career Framework , developed by Health Education England (HEE) as part of the National Transforming Nursing for Community and Primary Care Programme is in progress and will be available on the HEE website soon. This aims to provide a much needed career framework for GPNs (including healthcare assistants [HCAs] and advanced nurse practitioners [ANPs]). The new Framework builds on a competence framework developed by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP),1 which described specific …