NEARLY four in five nurses working in GP practices have not received a pay rise promised by the government last year, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has revealed.

The union said its members working “at the front door to the NHS” are being “repeatedly failed when it comes to their pay.”

The Department of Health and Social Care agreed last October to a 6 per cent increase of GP and staff pay, hailing the rise, backdated to April, as their “first meaningful pay rise in years.”

More than four months later, a survey of more than 1,600 general practice nursing staff who are directly employed by their surgery found that 30 per cent of nurses in England have received no pay rise in the last year.

Nearly half who responded to the RCN survey said they received an increase of less than 6 per cent.

Almost one in 20 were still waiting for confirmation of their pay uplift for 2024-25, leaving just 21 per cent saying they had received the 6 per cent uplift or more.

RCN has called for the government to reform the way England’s 24,000 nurses who work in GP surgeries are paid.

The union’s England executive director, Patricia Marquis, said nursing staff working in general practice are at the front door of the NHS and central to its success. 

“While the government has made it clear that it wants to move more care into the community, it is failing to invest in those tasked with making it happen,” she said. 

“An understaffed workforce is already struggling to recruit and retain people to the profession needed to deliver high-quality care to a growing number of patients.

“The government must now change the funding model for general practice and ringfence money for staff.”

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said:“This government inherited a broken NHS where general practice and nurses had been neglected for years, but through our Plan for Change we will fix the front door of the health service - shifting the focus from hospital to community.

“We hugely value the vital work of general practice nurses and have proposed the biggest boost to GP funding in years, an extra £889 million.

“Government funding has been made available for pay uplifts, and this should be passed on to salaried practice staff.”