Nurses are an essential part of the modern primary care team, but complement rather than replace GPs. I am fed up with the prevailing political view that GP is a job that is easy for a nurse to do following guidelines!! GPs do a very complex job of managing diagnostic uncertainty,balancing the wishes/demands of patients and relatives,costs of investigations and treatment, knowledge of probable outcomes and all the time trying to run to 10min appointments!! Nurses tend to take longer with patients, which all GPs would like to be able to do, and also investigate more. I seem to recall that research indicates that you would need at least 2 nurses to replace one GP and the cost of this, plus the costs of the investigations done by nurses, means that there are no real savings, and may indeed cost more!
Please can we shout long and loud that good,high quality,GP is vital for the NHS. We would be better with more resource for other professionals,such as nurses,to share the burden of chronic disease management and other areas dumped onto primary care from the hospital sector, but I do not think we can afford to lose GPs from primary care. Look at the way money is wasted in countries which do not have robust primary care. Remember any private firm always has directors who want bonuses and shareholders who want dividends, all money that would be lost from direct patient care. Remember,private firms were brought in to "clean" our hospitals............