Scotland GPN vacancy rate fell in the last year, new data shows

General practice nurse (GPN) vacancy rates have declined in Scotland over the past year, while reporting changes make it harder to achieve a longer-term understanding of workforce trends.

New data from NHS National Education Scotland (NES) shows that in the year to 31 March 2025 there was an estimated total national vacancy rate of 2.8% for all nursing roles in general practice, a notable fall from the 4.1% vacancy rate the year before.

Vacancy rates have fallen for the three largest primary care nurse roles, with GPN, advanced nurse practitioner (ANP) and treatment room nurses making up around 85% of the nursing workforce and all-seeing falls in vacancy rates.

In the year to 2025, there was 2.4% vacancy rate for both ANPs and GPNs and a 5.6% vacancy rate for treatment room nurses.

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The vacancy rate for consultant nurses remains high (30.2%), but NHS Education for Scotland says this is due to the small number of working time equivalent (WTE) nurses in this group.

Eileen McKenna, associate director of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in Scotland, told Nursing in Practice that improving retention and recruitment was key to bringing more ‘suitable candidates’ into the role.

‘While some progress has been made in recent. years, with the General Medical Services (GMS) contract including money for GPs to pay similar increases to those NHS staff have received, we know not all employers are passing the full increase on to their staff.

‘We need to see much greater consistency,’ she said.

Ms McKenna also pointed to Audit Scotland’s general practice report published In March that revealed that the expansion of primary care teams had been ‘slower than planned’.

‘Audit Scotland found that competing priorities within practices can reduce the amount of time GPNs have to focus on, for example, prevention and supporting patients with long-term conditions,’ Ms McKenna explained.

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The report also pointed to a ‘levelling off’ of GPN numbers in Scotland since 2019, with the Scottish government having made no format commitment to increase the number of GPNs, unlike their promise to expand GP numbers.

The RCN in Scotland cautioned that while ‘on the face of it,’ a decline in GPN vacancy rates had improved, the method for data collection has changed since 2022, which could account for a variation in results.

This may account for a significant change in recorded vacancy rates between the last two years and the year 2022/23, where the national vacancy rate was 12.6%, they said.

In the year 2021/22, 19% of responding practices reported vacancies for general practice nurses, whilst 10% of practices reported vacancies for advanced nurse practitioners (ANPs).

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NHS NES, which publishes the surveys, told Nursing in Practice that given changes to the methodology since 2023, the annual findings before and after this change are ‘different’ and ‘not comparable’.

There have been changes to senior nurse leadership in Scotland this year, with a new minister for social care and mental wellbeing being appointed in June and a new chief nursing officer (CNO) appointed in July.