NMC marks year of change and achievement

We have published our Annual Report and Accounts and our Annual Fitness to Practise Report for 2019-2020, which demonstrates the key achievements we’ve made to support those involved in our regulatory and strategic activities to deliver better care for everyone.

A year in review

This year we continued to build on the progress made in recent years and published our ambitious strategy for 2020-2025, setting out our vision and purpose and the values as the foundation of everything we do.

Other key highlights of this year’s work outlined in our Annual Report include:

• Launching our transformational new midwifery standards that will ensure women, babies and their families receive the best and safest care possible for future generations to come.
• Celebrating 100 years of nursing regulation with our ‘Always Caring, Always Nursing’ professional pride campaign.
• Becoming the first professional healthcare regulator to sign up to the NHS England ‘Ask Listen Do’ campaign – making it easier for people with learning disabilities and/or autism to have the voices heard and improve the way we listen and act on complaints.
• Developing a new streamlined process to make it more swift and efficient for professionals joining from overseas.
• Reduction of NMC staff turnover from 21.9% to 13.5%

Fitness to Practise Report

The report showcases the many improvements we’ve made to fitness to practise since launching our new approach in 2018. These steps are helping us to promote a culture of openness and learning and support all those involved in the fitness to practise process, including nursing and midwifery professionals and the public.

These continued improvements include:

• The pilot launch of a free and confidential emotional helpline for nurses, midwives and nursing associates, which has been contacted over 280 times.
• Research into how we could use personal experience statements in our investigations to help amplify the voice of people who use health and social care services.
• Our Public Support Service has also continued to play a vital role making sure people’s voices are heard, supporting over 150 members of the public this year who’ve been involved in fitness to practise. In recognition of their work, they have been shortlisted for a patient safety award.
• New EDI research, which will be published later this year, will help us to better understand how nurses, midwives and nursing associates with different protected characteristics experience our processes and highlight any inequalities

We have continued to work closely with employers of health and care services to help ensure concerns are resolved at the right level. We developed guidance for employers to help them better understand when to refer concerns to us and piloted this, with plans to launch in March that were postponed due to Covid-19.

Finally, we have worked hard to ensure that we are always considering the context in which incidents when making decisions. We also developed policy guidance on context, created a tool to help our teams identify context and worked hard to share information with our key partners across health and social care.

Andrea Sutcliffe CBE, Chief Executive and Registrar of the NMC, said:

“2019-2020 has been a year of progress and achievement for the NMC. I’m incredibly proud of my colleagues who have worked so hard to make these improvements a reality. I’m also very grateful to our partners, the professionals on our register and the public who have worked with us throughout the year helping us to determine what we need to do better.

“We didn’t know then that we were preparing for the biggest challenge of our professional lives. The Covid-19 pandemic has tested us all – our communities, our health and care system, our nursing and midwifery professionals and the NMC itself.

“The progress we have made; our new strategy; our values of fairness, kindness, ambition and collaboration – they all mean we were in the best possible position to respond to the challenges of a global pandemic and now to adjust to a new world and new ways of working.

“What remains, and always will, is our focus on realising our ambition of safe, kind and effective care for all by inspiring confidence in our nursing and midwifery professionals and thereby protecting the public.

Philip Graf, Chair of the NMC, said:

“It’s been a successful year and we continue to work hard to help shape a professional culture that values diversity and inclusion, and prioritises openness and learning.

“It’s clear that the effects of the pandemic will be felt for a long time to come. Thankfully, our new strategy sets a strong foundation for us to manage the challenges we will face and support our dedicated nursing and midwifery professionals as move forward.”

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