This symposium explores three foundational pillars essential for advancing nursing practice in primary care: collaboration, cultivation and care.

Collaborate focuses on the strategic integration of nurses within multidisciplinary teams and care pathways. This pillar examines approaches to bridging existing gaps in collaborative practice, demonstrating how community nurses can be effectively embedded within integrated care models. By strengthening these partnerships, nurses can maximise health outcomes whilst enhancing overall team effectiveness and care coordination.

Cultivate addresses the critical need to develop clinical reasoning capabilities in the next generation of nurses. Moving beyond protocol-driven practice, this pillar explores how to nurture critical thinking skills that enable nurses to confidently navigate complex clinical situations, adapt to diverse patient presentations, and contribute meaningfully to clinical decision-making processes.

Care encompasses both the delivery of excellent patient care and the essential practice of professional self-care. This pillar tackles the pressing challenge of burnout prevention in high-demand, resource-constrained environments, presenting practical strategies for sustaining nursing workforce wellbeing whilst maintaining high standards of care delivery.

Together, these three dimensions create a comprehensive framework for nursing excellence in primary care. This integrated approach directly contributes to the broader goal of building resilient, patient-centred primary care systems that can adapt and thrive in an evolving healthcare landscape.