We're clear about our EDI responsibilities as a leading healthcare regulator, and we’re ambitious about what we can achieve when we work to promote best practice in equality and collaborate with others to ensure our processes, and the wider sector, are rooted in fairness.
EDI in our strategy
EDI is threaded throughout our Strategy 2020-2025. There are three key roles, and each of them is an opportunity for us to strengthen our approach to EDI:
Regulate: We promote and uphold high standards that state how professionals must comply with equality and human rights law and provide person-centred care. We maintain the register of nursing and midwifery professionals eligible to practice by making non-biased decisions about how people go onto or are removed from the register. We step in to investigate on the rare occasions when care goes wrong and will consider how factors such as discrimination and health inequalities affect the context of the cases we investigate.
Support: We proactively support the professionals on our register. We seek to understand the diversity of the professionals on our register and the students and overseas professionals who are working to be on the register. We aim to strike the right balance between investigating rare cases of poor practice and promoting excellent practice, recognising that excellent practice includes cultural competence and understanding the factors that lead to health inequalities.
Influence: Regulating and supporting our professions puts us in a unique position to influence the development of health and social care and drive improvement. Regulating nursing and midwifery professionals gives us the opportunity to be able to identify issues of discrimination across the wider health and care workforce. We work collaboratively with our partners, including seldom-heard groups and organisations that represent diverse communities to address common concerns and drive improvement across the sector.
Our values
Our values have EDI at their core:
- We’re fair: We treat everyone fairly. Fairness is at the heart of our role as a trusted, transparent regulator and employer.
- We’re kind: We act with kindness and in a way that values people, their insights, situations and experiences.
- We’re ambitious: We take pride in our work. We’re open to new ways of working and always aim to do our best for the professionals on our register, the public we serve and each other.
- We’re collaborative: We value our relationships (both within and outside of the NMC) and recognise that we’re at our best when we work well with others
