60% of GPNs go without weekly development or study time, finds survey  

Almost 60% of practice nursing staff are not given any time for professional development or training on a weekly basis, an exclusive survey has suggested.

Only 7.5% of respondents said they were given just one hour a week for professional study or development.

The findings come from a Nursing in Practice survey of 252 practice nursing staff and revealed that most general practice nurses (GPNs) take on additional training and development in their personal time.

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One practice nurse said: ‘[I] have to fight for every single minute of study leave, [I] do 99% in my own time.’

Others said they were given more opportunities for training and development but explained that they often had to request this themselves.

A nurse team lead said: ‘No formal time is allocated to this [training and development], but I have never been denied a course that I wanted to attend.’

One practice nurse described how they were not ‘regularly’ allocated training time but were able to book dedicated time for study.

Another clinical manager explained that it was up to them to allocate their training time, which they usually completed outside of practice time.

Just over 10% of respondents said they had half an hour of allocated development time, while fewer than 1% were given between six to eight hours per week.

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The majority of respondents (59%) said they were not given any time at all on a weekly basis.

However, some respondents reported working in practices that proactively allocated training and development time.

One nurse specialist described being given monthly protected time for learning in the afternoons, which equate to around an hour per week.

Nursing in Practice also recently exclusively revealed that over a third of general practice nursing staff say they ‘never’ have clinical supervision.

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Some practice nurses described only being given supervision opportunities as part of their annual appraisal, while others said they had not received any time for formal clinical reflection for many years. 

This survey was open between 31 March and 14 April 2025, collating responses using the SurveyMonkey tool. A total of 280 GP nursing staff from across the UK responded to these questions. The survey was advertised to our readers via our website and email newsletter, with a prize draw for a £200 voucher as an incentive to complete the survey. We asked for practice codes or practice names and postcodes, and asked them to confirm what role they held. We removed those with duplicate email addresses, and searched for duplicate IP addresses, removing obvious duplicate entries. The survey was unweighted, and we do not claim this to be scientific – only a snapshot of the GP nursing staff population.