The role of nurses in general practice is crucial in supporting clinicians to deliver high quality care. The huge value general practice nurses bring was recognised in the report Leading the Way: the role and value of nurses in general practice in England, which was published in December 2021.  This is an invitation to you to discover where your practice sits as against the report’s findings, and help us with a small bit of information for the next stage of the work.

Commissioned from Sonnet, with support from Sheffield Hallam University, by NHS England, and lauded by both the Royal College of Nursing and the Queen’s Nursing Institute among others, the report highlighted not just the four arenas (practice, patients, community and wider NHS) in which nurses in general practice bring value, but also the distinctive way in which that is done. 

The development of nursing in primary care is key to the effective delivery of the NHS’s Long Term Plan.  Responding to the model outlined in Leading the Way, NHS England have commissioned further research to find out how widely that model is seen in practice across England.  This will entail a short initial survey to confirm where nurses are working in general practice, and how they are balanced with other professionals within those practices.  This survey is best completed once for each practice by you, the Practice Manager.

This short survey will gather information about your practice workforce – the nursing staff you have working in your practice and their qualifications. This combination of data is not available elsewhere, therefore we need to collect this data via this survey. We will be combining your responses on your nursing workforce with the latest NHS Digital General Practice Workforce data on your total workforce to develop a full picture of your practice, while also minimising the data we need to collect directly from you.

Following this survey Sonnet and Sheffield Hallam will conduct:

  • A series of interviews with general practices to explore the models they are using for the roles of nurses within the practice, and to enable those to be compared with the model described in the Leading the way report
  • A wider survey exploring how nurses bring value to practices in the context of the principal challenges facing local areas

As NHS England we will use the findings of this work to inform future workforce and policy development, and see it complementing existing nursing workforce initiatives like the revised General Practice Nursing Education and Career Framework. Therefore we would be grateful for as many practices to complete the survey as possible. 

While the survey is short and has five questions only, you may need to gather information prior to completing it. We therefore recommend you only open and begin the survey once you have collected the necessary information to complete the survey. The questions in the survey are available via this website, through which you will also find tools to make collecting the qualifications data easy for you.

Click here to complete the survey.  We would be very grateful if you complete it, and if you’re prepared to give an interview for the purposes of the study too, please tick the relevant box within the survey. Please complete the survey by midnight on Friday 5 August.