Our purpose and vision

Our purpose is to:

“Promote and uphold the highest professional standards in nursing and midwifery to protect the public and inspire confidence in the professions.”

Fulfilling our purpose helps us to realise our vision:

“Safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery practice, improving everyone’s health and wellbeing.”

Our roles for 2020–2025

Our strategy is based on three key roles that underpin our purpose: regulate, support, and influence.

Regulate: We promote and uphold high standards, maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise, and step in to investigate on the rare occasions when care goes wrong.

Support: To ensure we regulate as progressively as possible, we proactively support our professions. This allows us to strike the right balance between investigating rare cases of poor practice and promoting excellent practice.

Influence: Regulating and supporting our professions puts us in a unique position to influence the development of health and social care. We work collaboratively with our partners to address common concerns and drive improvement across the sector.

Our strategic themes

We co-produced our strategy with nursing and midwifery professionals, our partners, the public and our NMC colleagues. We heard thousands of views and five strategic themes emerged.

These themes will guide how we plan our work, and our investment in people and resources between 2020 and 2025. They are:

  1. Improvement and innovation
  2. Proactive support for our professions
  3. More visible and informed
  4. Engaging and empowering the public, professionals and partners
  5. Insight and influence.

Find out more about how we developed our strategy

Building a five-year plan

We are clear about much of the work needed to deliver our strategy, but there are some areas that will take more time to scope fully.

Our annual corporate plan gives more detail of our priorities for the year ahead.