Who you should raise a concern with

Darllen yn Gymraeg

Raising a concern with a nurse, midwife or nursing associate's employer

In most cases, it's best to start by raising your concern with the nurse, midwife or nursing associate's place of work, and we'd usually recommend doing this before coming to us.

An employer is usually best placed to resolve issues quickly and fairly.

They may then decide to refer someone to us once they've investigated your concern themselves. All the information they gather during an internal investigation can then be used in our own investigations and speed up the process overall.

If you haven't raised your concern locally with the employer of the nurse, midwife or nursing associate, our screening team might talk about this with you.

Find out more about how to complain to the NHS

Find out more about patient advice and liaison services (PALs) in your area 

There are a number of organisations that can support you when raising concerns with the NHS like Healthwatch or the NHS’s complaints advocacy service. 

If you want to raise a concern about a health and social care service instead of an individual, please contact the Care Quality Commision. The Patients Association can also help you raise a concern with the CQC.

Referrals helpline

Once you’ve decided we’re the right organisation to raise a concern with, please call our referrals helpline. It’s there for any member of the public who’s considering raising a concern with us about a nurse, midwife or nursing associate. We can help explain more about who we are, how we can help you and most importantly, what support we can offer you.

Call us on 020 3307 6802. Some calls will be recorded to help us train colleagues and monitor the quality of support we provide. We might use the recording to check details about fitness to practise referrals and complaints. There’s more information in our privacy notice.

We don’t publish any of the concerns that are raised with us, although we may have to share some of the details in our concern with other people, like employers to gather the right evidence.

If your concern isn't about a nurse, midwife or nursing associate, please find a list of regulators that can help you below.

Sharing your information with us

We encourage everyone who raises a concern with us to give us their contact details. Sharing your information with us is important as it means we’re more likely to be able to investigate your concern.

In most cases, after you’ve raised a concern, we’ll need to get in touch with you to find out more information, make sure we have all the documentation we might need and explain to process to you.

To do this, we need a way to get in touch with you.

Having your contact details also allows us to keep you up to date with our process and inform you of the outcome.

You can let our screening team know that you’d like to remain anonymous throughout the process even though you’ve given us your details. They’ll do everything possible to accommodate this, but we can’t always guarantee it will be possible, for example if you need to attend a hearing.

If you choose to submit a concern to us without sharing your details, we can’t get in touch with you and this can sometimes mean we can’t take your concern forward.

This means it’s much harder for us to help you, act on the concerns you've raised with us or let you know the outcome of any investigation we might do. 

Sharing your referral

In order to properly investigate your concern, on some occasions we’ll need to disclose some of the details you’ve shared.

We often need to share share the details of the concern with the nurse, midwife or nursing associate and their employer, as we need to collect evidence that will help with any investigation.

Raise a concern