We recognise that if you’re currently working to address fitness to practise concerns the Covid-19 pandemic may be causing you new and difficult challenges.
We understand that you may need more time to respond to our concerns. You can get in touch with your case officer to ask for this, or if you’re represented, your representative can do this for you if you discuss it with them.
We may be able to give you more time to send us your response, unless we think we need to take immediate action to manage risk.
We want to highlight some of the things that you may still be able to do to show us you’ve addressed concerns which have been raised about your practice:
- Reflection is an important part of addressing a concern. If you can show that you’ve learned from what went wrong and are unlikely to do it again, then that’s a good way of demonstrating that you can practise safely. You can simply write your reflections down, or, if you want to, you can use our FtP reflective account form.
- You may also find it useful to have a reflective discussion with another registered nurse, midwife or nursing associate. Evidence of these discussions can demonstrate learning and help us with our decision making.
- You may be able to give us evidence that you’ve practised safely. This kind of evidence is especially helpful if it comes from your manager, or someone familiar with your recent practice. It will still be helpful even if you’ve been redeployed to a different area or setting: you can think about any particular skills or competencies that you were working on, and how much they transfer to your new area.
- Attending training and courses may be more difficult, but you can still complete online courses and e-learning. This can be a good way to demonstrate competency or knowledge in a particular area. You can also undertake research or further reading and identify key learning points on your log of continuous professional development.
You don’t have to provide us with any of this information, but it can help us make a decision on your case so we’d encourage you to do so. If you have a representative, then it’s worth having a discussion with them first.
Some kinds of concern may need to be addressed by doing things that Covid-19 may have made more difficult. Examples of this are completing particular courses, or being assessed or supervised. If there are further things you’d like to do to demonstrate that you can practise safely, but aren’t currently able to, then it’s worth telling us what these are so we can take this into account when making our decisions.
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