The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has set out its proposed 2020 to 2025 strategic themes for consultation. 

The NMC has been consulting on its next five year’s strategy and has now announced the five key themes that has emerged from this work.  These themes are also subject to a consultation launched by the NMC. 

A dynamic approach to shaping practice

• A need to ensure that the NMC’s standards are responsive to changing models of care and new ways of working (within and between disciplines) across the four countries of the UK.
• A particular need to agree and update our approach to specialist practice (including health visiting and community nursing).
• Nurses, midwives and nursing associates need more support at the outset of their careers.

Building our relationship with the public

• The NMC has a statutory duty to promote and maintain public confidence in nursing and midwifery.
• The NMC said there is scope for it to increase meaningful opportunities for people who use health and care services to influence the work of the NMC.

Strengthening relationships with our professions

• The NMC needs to strike a balance between ensuring rigour in our regulatory action while encouraging a just culture of fairness, openness and learning.
• Nurses and midwives said that the “possibility of sanction hangs over them and influences their view of the NMC”.
• “There is a risk that this climate undermines openness and learning, which our new fitness to practise approach is intended to enhance.” The NMC acknowledge that it can do more to address this perception.

Using and sharing research, data and intelligence

• Improving the use and dissemination of research, data and intelligence, consistent with good data governance and protection, will help to drive improvement in how the NMC works.

 Closer collaboration with others

• To achieve its ambitions there is an increasing need to work with our regulatory and other partners across health and care. Multi-disciplinary practice can lead to a single incident being examined by more than one professional regulator in addition to system-level scrutiny.