Pinnacle workforce survey reports 2023

Read the The Pinnacle General Practice Workforce Survey 2023 and Workforce Report 2023: Results from the 2023 workforce survey of Nurses and Practice Centre Assistants (PCA).

General practice is the backbone of health and the first interaction for most New Zealanders with the health care system. If the general practice model fails, demand for care will shift towards more expensive and stretched secondary services, leading to worsening sustainability issues.

The current workforce crisis has been years in the making and will now require gargantuan efforts across the entire healthcare system to address. Significant, urgent and imperative change is needed across the health system to improve the sustainability of primary health care, with general practice at its core.

Pinnacle has been advocating for general practice since the network was founded in 1989. Our first workforce report, published in 2006, highlighted challenges on both the supply side, such as an ageing workforce, and the demand side, including issues related to equity, an ageing population, and an increase in chronic conditions.

Over the last two decades, the network has been an early adopter of solutions to support the general practice team, such as introducing unregulated roles to directly support our frontline clinicians, and promoting the growth of general practice nursing. Over the last decade, the network has embedded new ways of collaboration to meet health and wellbeing needs by establishing interprofessional extended care teams (ECT). These developments originated in the feedback from GPs, practice nurses and management staff in our 2006 and 2009 workforce surveys.

Pinnacle’s vision is to continue delivering primary care that supports all people to thrive by realising their health and wellbeing potential. Achieving this requires placing the wellbeing of both patients and health care professionals at the forefront. The workforce report 2023 will assist Pinnacle to continue our ongoing advocacy, develop innovative approaches for meeting demand and planning for recruitment and retention of a valued and highly skilled general practice and primary care network.

Abridged from workforce report 2023 executive summary by Justin Butcher, Kaiwhakatere (Chief Executive Officer), Pinnacle Incorporated.