ABSTRACT
The focus groups conducted during the Derbyshire Nurse Practitioner Project provide some useful material around changing relationships between doctors and nurses in primary care. The first point to be made is that the process of defining a clear and distinct role was an important issue for each professional group in the team. The nurse practitioners and the doctors described their changing professional relationships. In the Johns Practice, the doctor mentor remarked that they spent a lot more time talking about things that they would not have talked about before. For the nurse in the Sanders Practice it was an eye-opener, during the training period, to be able to sit in on the doctor– patient consultation, which she had never before done as a nurse. In terms of workload distribution, the doctors in the Ongar Practice felt that they were not doing anything very different from before, but that the nurse practitioner was enabling more patients to be seen.
