Shaping Our Culture

Supporting our people:

• 78 new colleagues and made 140 colleagues on fixed-term contracts permanent to stabilise our teams
• We are recruiting more panel members to increase diversity and capacity
• We secured external support and expertise through new legal contracts and partnerships
• We are improving the safety, quality and people's experience of
  
  
  Fitness to Practise:
• Prevent delays and make prompt decisions at every stage of the Fitness to Practise process
• Appropriately manage incoming concerns and new referrals
• Be consistent in making proportionate decisions

Safeguarding people involved in our processes

Although we do not provide direct health or care services, we exist to protect the public. As a regulator, our work puts us into contact with vulnerable people and situations; this might include people receiving care, professionals on our register, those involved in stressful FtP cases or patients who have experienced trauma.

We have not always identified their safeguarding needs, and so we have not always taken the appropriate actions at the right point. As highlighted in the report, since April 2023, six people have died by suicide or suspected suicide while under, or having concluded, fitness to practise investigation. We offer our sincere condolences to their relatives.
We’re taking a number of steps to better protect people by strengthening our safeguarding processes.

Transforming our colleagues’ experience of working at the NMC

Half of the review’s recommendations sit across our EDI and People teams. To deliver significant and sustainable change, we must prioritise our people in a way we haven’t done before which means significant investment so we become a people-centred organisation. This also means identifying and confronting unacceptable behaviours, discrimination, low trust, micro-management, and lack of accountability for delivering outcomes for the public.

The five key areas that we’ll tackle to establish culture change:

1. Leadership and management capability
2. Building trust, psychological safety and inclusion
3. Accountability
4. Individual and organisational learning
5. Multi-professional working

Ensuring transparency, accountability and oversight

To help build trust and confidence in the NMC, we will provide comprehensive updates at our open Council meetings, with progress papers and meeting minutes published online.
Our oversight body, the Professional Standards Authority (PSA), has established an oversight and support group which will also receive regular updates.

The group is made up of key stakeholders; including Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officers from the four UK countries, trade unions, the Department of Health and Social Care and devolved administrations, and groups representing the public. Staff voice is represented through the NMC employee forum attendance.

The appointments of representatives from the Patient Safety Learning, the NHS Race and Health Observatory and Llais, were particularly important to us and will ensure we learn from the perspectives of patients and the public while applying an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) lens.

The meetings are chaired by the PSA Chief Executive and membership will be reviewed every six months.

This is indicative of the spirit of collaboration in which we want to move forward as one NMC. We want to work with people inside and outside our organisation to continually ‘test and challenge’ the steps we take, and make sure that nobody is left behind without a say in what a new, better NMC looks and feels like.

You can view the full membership and latest minutes on the PSA website.

Building leadership and management capability

The NMC’s senior leaders don’t shy away from the fact that the independent review found they have not met the challenges facing the organisation to date. They have committed to doing better, recognising that culture starts at the top and that EDI must be central to discussions and decisions at the top table of the NMC.

That’s why we have appointed Mac Alonge from the Equal Group as the first ever EDI Advisor to the executive board. Mac will offer test and challenge, and bring his expertise to strengthen the board and Council’s cultural competence as a group and individually.

Since September, starting with the Executive Board, we’ve rolled out 360 feedback to all leaders and managers as part of our ‘ambitious appraisals’ process.

We’ve also rolled out the NMC’s first universal behaviours framework – a tool to help all colleagues to build an engaging, inclusive culture within the NMC where everyone feels valued and belongs. This will be critical to our future work on recruitment, career progression, learning and development, and appraisals.