27 May 2022 ● Debbie Olusola, GP Nurse
Career Progression For General Practice Nurses
Debbie discusses career progression as a GP Nurse and explains the various ways you can expect to get on.
Topics Covered In This Article
Introduction
Hello, my name is Debbie and I'm a practice Nurse in London.
Today I'm going to be discussing the various career progressions available to practice Nurses.
Now it's commonly known that the higher up you go in nursing, be in a GP setting or in ward, the less patient contact you face.
Now this can sometimes be true.
So today I'm going to split the career progressions into two sections, non-clinical career progression and clinical career progression.
Nurse Prescriber
The first role or progression that you can have as a Practice Nurse is becoming a Nurse Prescriber.
This involves going to university, usually after you've been qualified as a Nurse for about two to three years.
And this is obviously up to the discretion of your practice because you would need to be working at the same time to shadow doctors, to shadow pharmacists to get the right experience needed.
Nurse Specialist
Another role you can venture into is becoming a Clinical Nurse Specialist.
As a CNS within a GP setting, a lot of long term conditions are seen hypertension, COPD, asthma, diabetes, the sexual health.
And if any of these appeal to you, you can do more courses and specialize in those fields.
Another clinical role includes becoming an Advanced Nurse Specialist. Now this role is typically seen as about a band seven/band eight role and it involves a lot more studying doing coursework and basically you can become an Advanced Nurse Specialist in a specific field.
I've known Respiratory and Advanced Nurse Specialist, Breast Cancer Advanced Nurse Specialists, so many types of Advanced Nurse Specialists, and in a general practice, you become a general Advanced Nurse Specialist.
And this role, is as in the name, very advanced it's almost seen as a Junior Doctor type of role where you are able to examine, you're able to make diagnosis, you are able to analyse and just use all the skills that you have and it's a lot more autonomous and independent.
Non-clinical Roles
Onto discussing non-clinical roles.
Now, just as a disclaimer, becoming a non-clinical Nurse involves many roles. And one thing that I do know is that some people who become non-clinical Nurses still keep their clinical roles at least once a week.
So when I was studying, I remember some of my lecturers they were that were training us.
They were for example, training us on venepuncture chat as taking blood. And they still ran clinics once a week to keep up with various skills.
So skills like taking smears, they need to be re-validated I think every three years. So, and re-validation in general as a Nurse is every three years.
So if you're doing a non-clinical role and you want to keep up with some of your skills. It's sometimes available to you to work at least once a week or twice a week in clinic and do whatever other role you have as a non-clinical Nurse on the other days.
Lead Nurse
Another role includes becoming a Lead Nurse.
So this role can be seen as a management role where you are ensuring that Nurses within your CCG, within your area, within your practice are getting the right training.
There's the right amount of funding you can allocated to GP practices.
You're newly qualified Nurses are being supported in the right manner and attending various meetings and you are also part of the policy making, this is a lead Nurse in the area.
Public Health Nurse
Now another role that's a little less common is becoming a Public Health Nurse.
Now this is another type of Nursing course that you can go on.
Some people do it as a Masters where you are there to prevent various diseases, intervene on things like smoking, obesity, things that are commonly a problem in specific demographic or a specific area population.
A Public Health Nurse tends to specialize on the community and the general public. So this is something that you can also go into.
GP Partner
More recently, I've seen Nurses become GP partners, so as you know, GP practices are run like businesses, so they become stakeholders.
Now, if you've been in a practice for a certain length of time, you become part of those who make the regulations the policies involved in your practice.
Nurse Assessor
And lastly, this role is quite unconventional but it is a role that after one year qualification obviously depending on the company you can go into and that's becoming a Nurse assessor.
Now this role is not under the NHS.
It's more working with the government, and it includes doing a holistic assessment on people who have long term conditions and are in need of finances and funding from the government.
So if somebody, for example experiences chronic pain and they're under medication, you would assess their activities of daily living and see how this is affecting their everyday life to ensure that they are receiving the right support from the government and finances.
Conclusion
So, as I said in the beginning, this list is not exhaustive.
There are so many roles out there that as a Practice Nurse, if you would just do a bit more training and would just know the right people sometimes you can go into as a Practice Nurse, you can always go back into the hospital at a higher band.
And likewise, as a ward Nurse or hospital Nurse, you're also able to come into the GP practice setting.
The blessing of being a Nurse is that skills are transferable.
