Nursing and Midwifery Council Special Report (June 2008)
On 14 March 2008 the Minister of State for Health Services wrote to us to ask us to expedite our annual performance review and to address ‘the central question of whether the NMC is fulfilling its statutory functions.’
Through the performance review we found that the NMC was carrying out its statutory functions but failed to fulfil these to the standard of performance that the public had a right to expect of a regulator. In particular, we identified six areas of significant weakness in the management of fitness to practise complaints by the NMC.
These were:
- The absence of an electronic based case management system
- Delays in dealing with cases
- Timeliness and poor quality of correspondence which was sometimes insensitive, misleading and/or discouraged people from making complaints about a registrant’s fitness to practise
- The quality, comprehensiveness and variability of information and statistics provided by the executive to Council members on fitness to practise cases
- Concerns about delays in setting up systems for the assessment of fitness to practise panel members (‘panellists’) and decisions to extend the terms of office of existing panellists
- Delays in providing agreed training for panellists on child protection issues.
We agreed that we would keep the NMC’s progress in addressing the issues identified in our Special report under review in 2008/09.
We published our report in June 2008.