If you work in private nursing or even in homecare, then you will know that the primary care industry doesn’t always get the care that it deserves. This is especially the case when you look at vaccinations or even long-term conditions. The voice of primary care is still being dominated by GPS and the main reason for this is because the structure of the sector has changed by a significant amount. Practices tend to be small businesses who are actually run by self-employed GPS and when you look at the rest of the NHS you will see that a lot of them work in isolation. They may work in small teams at times but that ultimately means that in secondary care, the hierarchy is slowly disappearing. The structure of primary care is helping to influence the perception of the public and it is also helping to reinforce any views that might be outdated. Patients are getting worked up over whether or not they see a nurse or a doctor, but they don’t really care in other settings. People believe that they are being short-changed if they do not get the chance to see a doctor and this is not good to say the least. Nurses who work in primary care are not getting the same level of representation either, and this is especially the case when you compare it to nurses who happen to work in other sectors.

The simple message here is that those who work in primary care really do deserve a lot more recognition for their work and if the sector is going to change to meet the patient needs then they need to be given a much greater influence of how the services are going to evolve in general.