Spiralling cost of complaints putting strain on nursing and midwifery regulator

As the statutory regulator of nurses and midwives, we protect the wellbeing of the public by setting standards of education, training, conduct and performance, and investigating those who do not meet the standards. With over 680,000 registrants, our register is the biggest of all the health regulators and we get around 4,600 complaints against nurses and midwives every year. Our current legislation ties us into a cumbersome and expensive approach to investigating these complaints.

Currently, 77 percent of our budget is spent on dealing with complaints against nurses and midwives and we, along with the other professional health regulators are seeing a year on year increase in the number of complaints. This level of expenditure is unsustainable and our current legislation ties us to inefficient ways of working. We hope the next government will bring forward a bill at the earliest opportunity to improve public protection and enable us to be a more efficient regulator.

An independent review of our progress since 2012, published in September 2014, confirmed the progress we have made since 2012 in modernising and becoming more efficient as an organisation. Despite this assessment we are not complacent and will continue to strive to make improvements in our work. For example, as a lot of complaints come from employers we are introducing a new service to work more closely with them on referrals. We anticipate that this will help reduce our costs and, by responding effectively to concerns and incidents at a local level, benefit patients too.

In December 2014 we exceeded a challenging target set by the Department of Health and by the House of Commons Health Committee to get fitness to practise cases to a hearing within six months of being referred to the investigating committee. More than 4,000 referrals have been dealt with since July 2012 – more than all other healthcare regulators combined.

The funding we receive from registration fees paid by nurses and midwives enables us to carry out our important public protection work and we understand that any fee rise fee impacts on nurses and midwives. Our governing council reviews the level of the registration fee every year to ensure that we have sufficient funds in order to carry out our regulatory functions to the level required to protect the public. Our cost assumptions were externally verified, subject to a public consultation and then approved by the NMC Council.

As a result of concerns raised by registrants during the consultation, we have recently obtained a legislative change to permit us to introduce phased payments of the registration fee which we hope to implement in 2016. In the meantime, nurses and midwives who are UK taxpayers can claim tax relief on the registration fee, though only a third of nurses and midwives currently do so. The rebate would offset the rise in the fee. Nurses and midwives can claim this relief through HMRC.