We study the endemic behaviour of a homogeneously mixing SIS epidemic in a population of size N with a general infectious period, Q, by introducing a novel subcritical branching process with immigration approximation. This provides a simple but useful approximation of the quasistationary distribution of the SIS epidemic for finite N and the asymptotic Gaussian limit for the endemic equilibrium as N → ∞. A surprising observation is that the quasistationary distribution of the SIS epidemic model depends on Q only through E[Q].