Pages: 22 - 23
Article topics: Primary care
General practice nursing is often described as the backbone of primary care. The phrase is familiar, and it is true, but it can also obscure as much as it reveals. Backbones are expected to hold things up. They are rarely seen, seldom thanked, and too often noticed only when they begin to fail. The findings from a recent Queen's Institute of Community Nursing (QICN) national survey of general practice nurses (drawn from responses of over 1,000 nurses working in general practice across the UK) offer a timely and uncomfortable reminder that a highly skilled, deeply committed workforce is being asked to sustain an increasingly complex workload without the infrastructure, recognition, employment conditions or protected time required to do so safely.
