Burnout and stress in general practice

It has been a long and winding road over the past 18 months. The focus of the news has been on secondary care, but what has it been like for practice nursing – a generally overlooked and undervalued profession? We did not stop during this time; we rose to the challenge and changed the way we worked to accommodate our new world, but at what cost?

We are now seeing more general practice nurses (GPNs) taking early retirement or simply just leaving, and question on the tip of our tongue is why? One major reason could be burnout. We gave our all, we worked in new and different ways, we stayed late, and kept seeing patients everyday. We stepped up to the challenge of switching to telephone and video consultations. All of this took energy, but at what cost? In a survey of 184 GPNs, 52% said that workloads had greatly increased and 29% said workloads had slightly increased during the pandemic (Launder, 2021).