What are GP practices in Wakefield doing about an ageing GP nursing workforce?

In Wakefield 28% of GP Practices Nurses are over 55 years of age and it is a risk for practices because they are eligible for retirement. We have been looking at the workforce data this week to see what practices are doing about it. Below is the raw data from the workforce survey tool. We have analysed the data per network and below is tabulated the raw data:

One of our first thoughts was whether having more nurse mentors helps with nurse recruitment. Nurse mentors are a vital and mandatory aspect of the assessment of pre-registration nursing students. Mentors have an important role in developing and training the future nursing workforce, assessing students performance in practice and acting as professional roles models.

We have looked at each network of practices in Wakefield and compared the percentage of practice nurses over the age of 55 years of age with the number of nurse mentors in that network. Below is a scatter plot of the number of mentors per network versus the % of practice nurses over 55 years of age:

The scatter plot seems to show that networks that have more nurses over 55 years of age have more mentors, so having more mentors is not associated with less nurses over 55.

The other data we have is the % of nurses who are under 35 years of age. Below is a scatter plot of the % of nurses under 35 years of age compared with the % of nurses aged over 55 years of age by network across Wakefield:

This seems to show that in networks with more nurses over 55 years of age they have more nurses under 35 years of age. So, in answer to the question what are networks/practices doing to address the issue of an ageing GP nursing workforce, well they are recruiting more younger nurses!