On 26 May 2022, Council approved our new post-registration standards following our consultation last year. You can now read the new standards, in both English and Welsh. You can read the papers from the Council meeting here.
In this blog Professor Geraldine Walters (Executive Director, Professional Practice), looked at the journey to develop the standards and the benefit they’ll have for people who use services and their wider communities.
Final approval of the standards
We worked with UK-wide partners from across health and social care to use all the evidence gathered, including the consultation and user testing findings, to consider how we could refine the standards we consulted on. We did this to ensure that the final standards are evidence based and help to make sure that specialist community, and public health nurses get a great education that reflects contemporary practice, so people can access highly skilled, specialist support and care, close to home.
Our post-registration steering group met at the end of April to discuss the progress and view the refinements to the standards. The members were sufficiently assured that the refined suite of post-registration draft standards meet the expectations set, and supported the recommendation to seek approval of the standards by Council.
On 26 May 2022, Council approved the new standards. You can now read the new standards, in both English and Welsh.
Our consultation
We began the programme to renew and update these standards in 2019, to reflect the changing landscape and ambition for public health and the care and treatment of people in the community. It’s important for our standards to develop in line with changing health and care practices.
In developing the draft post registration standards we sought to reinforce the opportunity for more professionals to develop a greater depth of knowledge and skills that really reflect the complexity, responsibility and diversity of modern specialist community nursing and public health nursing practice.
To make sure that our draft standards were shaped by a diverse range of voices and perspectives, we undertook a range of engagement activities during 2020.
Our consultation ran for 16 weeks, from April to August 2021.
We'd like to thank all those who took the time to take part in our consultation, or attended one of more than 60 webinars, drop-in sessions or panel discussions.
Our consultation findings
Modernising our standards will ensure they reflect contemporary professional practice, and benefit the people they care for in the community.
A large majority of the 2,363 respondents welcomed the three sets of standards, agreeing they were largely fit for purpose:
- 75 per cent agree that the draft core and field specific standards of proficiency reflect the specialist knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary for all SCPHN registrants. There was strong agreement that they meet the proficiency requirements for health visitors (76%), occupational health nurses (79%) and school nurses (83%).
- For SPQ, we asked about the applicability of the draft standards for each of the seven platforms of nursing. 72-88 per cent across the five fields of current community SPQ practice agreed they were applicable.
- 64 per cent of all respondents felt the standards were appropriate for nurses who practice in other community settings.
- For post-registration programme standards for both SCPHN and SPQ at least 67 per cent agreed with most of the proposals, with higher levels of agreement for many of them.
To highlight our findings, we’ve published two reports, both produced by independent research agencies:
We also completed a Consultation response document
