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Understanding Fitness to Practise
- All guides
- Using fitness to practise
- Allegations we consider
- How we determine seriousness
- Why we screen cases
- When we use interim orders
- Investigations
- Examining cases
- How we manage cases
- Meetings and hearings
- Resolving cases by agreement
- What sanctions are and when we might use them
- Remediation and insight
- 1: Screening
- 2: Interim Orders
- 3: Investigations
- 4: Case Examiners
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5: Hearings
- All guides
- Drafting charges
- Notice of our hearings and meetings
- Disclosure
- Hearing fitness to practise allegations together
- Managing cases before the Fitness to Practise Committee
- Preliminary meetings
- Voluntary removal
- Consensual panel determination
- Cancelling hearings
- Offering no evidence
- Dealing with cases at hearings or meetings
- Materials placed before panels at final hearings
- Proceeding in absence
- Public and private
- Postponing or adjourning hearings
- Incorrect or fraudulent entry decision making at hearings
- Making decisions on dishonesty charges
- Constitution of panels
- 6: Sanctions
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7: Reviews
- All guides
- Reviewable decisions
- Interim order reviews
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Substantive order reviews
- Standard reviews before expiry
- Early review
- Exceptional cases: changing orders with immediate effect at a standard review
- Review of striking-off orders
- New allegations
- Breach of substantive orders
- Reviews where an interim order is in place
- Allowing orders to expire when a nurse or midwife’s registration will lapse
- 8: Appeals and restoration
In this guide
Purpose
Back to topThe purpose of advice is to give nurses and midwives private guidance to assist them in keeping their practice safe, following an acknowledged minor breach of the Code.
Thresholds
Back to topAdvice is appropriate in cases where the regulatory concern is not serious enough to found an allegation of impaired fitness to practice, and is likely to be most suitable in cases that relate only to minor breaches of the Code.
Our screening threshold requires that the concerns about a nurse or midwife’s practice would need to appear serious enough to call into question their fitness to practise before we would refer the case for investigation. Cases that only involve a minor breach of the Code (which could in theory be closed with advice), would not pass our screening threshold, and therefore, we would not open an investigation into a nurse or midwife’s practice for the sole purpose of giving advice.
The most common use of advice is in cases where a regulatory concern which would have been serious enough to appear to require restriction of a nurse or midwife’s right to practise, or a public declaration to protect confidence in the professions or uphold standards, has fallen away during the course of our investigation, leaving only minor breaches of the Code.
Because we do not publish advice, the key difference in thresholds between advice and warnings is that advice is given privately to the nurse or midwife to help them to avoid future incidents which could call into question their fitness to practise, but warnings involve a public record that is available to the nurse and midwife and members of the public.
Requirements
Back to topAdvice is not appropriate in cases where the nurse or midwife disputed the facts that formed the basis of the regulatory concern.
Content of advice
Back to topThe advice issued privately to a nurse or midwife is intended to remind them of their obligations under the Code, and where appropriate will signpost relevant guidance or standards that may help the nurse or midwife continue to practise safely in the future.
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- Last Updated: 28/07/2017