Community nursing as a career

The pandemic emphasised the essential role of nurses within the NHS and global health systems. It highlighted their physical, and their emotional labour (Delgado et al, 2017), and the emotion management undertaken by the UK healthcare professionals (Dowrick et al, 2021). The recent nurses' strikes have propelled their role back into the UK media spotlight. As such, this will influence the public image of nurses and nursing, and whether an individual will consider a future career as a Registered Nurse. Hughes (2023) set out a gloomy view of the current state of the NHS and, in particular, of district nursing, and how cost improvement programmes have reduced the attraction of community nursing roles, not only due to the grades and low pay on offer, but also because of workload pressures.

Remarkably there have been a large number of studies on the job satisfaction of hospital nurses, as evidenced by systematic literature reviews (Lu et al, 2012; Lu et al, 2019). However, there have been very few studies on the job satisfaction of nurses working outside hospitals. While being a hospital nurse is a different role from that of a community nurse, the job satisfaction research is informative regarding influencial factors, such as personal attributes, work characteristics and leadership, as well as job performance, intention to quit and burnout.