The Nursing & Midwifery Council’s (NMC) next five-year strategy has been approved.  A fitness to practise view on the strategy.

NMC Strategy

The strategy is based on three key roles that underpin the NMC’s purpose: 

Regulate: We promote and uphold high standards, maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise, and step in to investigate on the rare occasions when care goes wrong. 

Support: To ensure we regulate as progressively as possible, we proactively support our professions. This allows us to strike the right balance between investigating rare cases of poor practice and promoting excellent practice. 

Influence: Regulating and supporting our professions puts us in a unique position to influence the development of health and social care. We work collaboratively with our partners to address common concerns and drive improvement across the sector.

NMC Regulation and fitness to practise

The new strategy has been adopted in the context of a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.  A lot of these factor can have a direct bearing on the ability of nurses and midwifes to practice their professional safely:

• Workplace culture
• Reflective practice
• Workforce pressures and shortages
• Regulatory reform

NMC fitness to practise by 2025

Improvement and innovation – The NMC will “have easily accessible processes, support and advice available for” nurses and midwives where “learning about the impact of contextual factors will” be an important factor.

The NMC will “systematically investigate the impact of contextual factors in fitness to practise cases, while retaining a focus on individual professional accountability” which will “help us achieve fairer outcomes” and “improve our approach to fitness to practise investigations, to improve the experience and support for those involved, whether professionals or the public.”

Proactive support – As previously mentioned, the NMC recognise regulatory standards, education and process of revalidation support should “better meet and adapt to the changing needs” of the profession. They will do this though a “dynamic approach” to developing professional standards, a new set of ambitious post-registration standards of proficiency and strengthening it approach to revalidation.

Engaging and empowering – The NMC will “embed a person-centred approach” in all our regulatory activity, testing our progress through a public engagement programme.