Welcome review of the Nursing and Midwifery Council. About time.
My erstwhile professional regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, is getting itself into a bit of a pickle.
A welcome enquiry into the way it regulates nurses is about to start, launched by ex-nurse and Minster for Health Anne Milton, after, but probably not because, the Chief Executive removed himself suddenly from the field of play in January 2012 and may or may not have trousered a golden goodbye. The NMC won’t say, apparently.
I got all that from the Guardian.
The NMC has a wordy waffly explanation welcoming the review, because it presents “an important opportunity to achieve clarity and consistency”.
Ms Milton’s ministerial statement is here.
She’s is quite rightly concerned about fitness to practise and doubts that the NMC is doing as well as it could in carrying out its statutory duties “to promote high standards of conduct and practise, in order to protect the public”.
I’d go along with that.
I’ve been exercised about the failure in nursing culture in relation to the love and care of elderly men and women. Every NHS scandal of negligence and abuse in the last ten years, probably longer, has had two things in common - vulnerable older men and women and severe failures in nursing care and culture. Disturbed nurses (or the straightforwardly murderous, it hardly matters) like Anne Grigg-Booth Colin Norris, Barbara Salisbury or the current individual in the news responsible for contaminating IV bags in Stepping Hill are a case apart.
The far bigger problem, with many more victims than single handed malign forces can create, is this one of replicated deviant nursing cultures. The evidence must surely hint that cultural problems in care of elderly men and women are more common, more widespread and more banal than headliner killer nurses. Challenging the culture that makes crap care possible is why protecting the public must take priority in the planned review of whether the NMC is, itself, fit for purpose.
I have blogged about the cultural erosion of nursing humanity that some Trust Executive nurses have supervised, without apparently suffering any conspicuous professional regulatory sanction.
My punt into the NMC about executive nurses and NMC disciplinary procedures as mentioned at the end of my blog piece on the Care Quality Commission of 13/10/11 got nowhere. That was probably my fault for not phrasing a better request – or spending time working out how to rephrase it. This was their timely but fruitless response.
My gender reassignment was by their choice, not mine.
