Queen’s Nurses Supporting Farming Community Health

Queen’s Nurses Gill Boast, GPN Facilitator & Training Programme Lead, GPN Foundation School, and Sister Rose Bain, Lead GPN at Barton Family Practice have been working to support the health of the Farming Community in Staffordshire. Gill explains more about this initiative in this short blog.

Sister Rose liaised with Staffordshire and Birmingham Agricultural Society (SABAS) to set up Health Hubs for Farmers. Over the past two years we have attended Ploughing Matches as Queen’s Nurses to check blood pressures and pulses and to offer general health advice and information.

This year, we went to Dunstall Ploughing Match and then Kingstone, Uttoxeter. These events were busy and after taking some measurements, we needed to send two people to hospital urgently! We worked closely with the Paramedics in attendance and hopefully this has averted more serious cardiac events or strokes for the people involved.

In addition, we alerted many other people to take action about their high blood pressure. We also worked together with Everyone Health, who joined us to provide some additional health checks, for example cholesterol checks.

We also made some great connections with the Farming Community Network (FCN) who have invited us to one of their meetings in the New Year to speak to Farmers.

It is great neighbourhood community work in a population who tend not to present in General Practice, due to the pressures of working on the land and looking after livestock at all hours.

Rose and I have been doing this work in our own time, as Queen’s Nurses, but we are in discussions to see if we can develop this further, particularly in view of the new NHS Health Plan and the focus on neighbourhood health.

About Gill Boast

Gill Boast, BSc (Hons) Clinical Practice, V300, PGCE, MEd, ALNP, PNA, QN, is a GPN Facilitator & Training Programme Lead for the GPN Foundation School. She was awarded the Queen’s Nurse title in 2014 and Fellowship of the QICN in November 2025.

About Rose Bain

Rose Bain is Sister/Practice Nurse Lead, Independent/Supplementary Prescriber  at Barton Family Practice. Rose was awarded the Queen’s Nurse title in 2024.