The Covid-19 pandemic has put the UK health and care workforce under unprecedented pressure. For nurses, the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated many issues that predated the pandemic, including inequalities, inadequate working conditions and chronically excessive workloads. The recent King’s Fund report, The Courage of Compassion: Supporting nurses and midwives to deliver highquality care, investigated the key changes to working environments of nursing and midwifery staff needed to enable them to flourish and thrive at work (West et al, 2020). This piece draws out some of the key findings from the research and asks what needs to be done to better support nursing staff working in the community, now and into the future.