NHS blame culture sees nurses referred to regulator without investigations

Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “If your automatic reaction is to say ‘something has happened and who is to blame’, and the first thing you do is refer them to their professional regulator without considering anything else, then you don’t get the learning, you don’t really know what happened.” The NMC has set up a new employer liaison service which takes enquiries from hospital trusts, care homes and other employers. “I genuinely do not believe you get safe effective care by making nearly 725,000 people scared of their regulator, because if they're scared of us, they're going to be defensive, they're not going speak up when they should, they're not going to learn the lessons they need to.” She said the NMC was aiming to speed up its processes and improve the cases it accepted by pushing back on inappropriate referrals from employers and to reflect back on wider lessons. “We don't have all the powers we would like,” said Ms Sutcliffe, adding: “We would like to be able to make decisions earlier in the process that would enable us to agree how we conclude cases, so we don't have to go all the way through to an adversarial hearing.” She said at the moment the NMC was forced into a “legalistic approach” that required it to use words like “allegations” and to hold hearings like trials. And we need to be capable of conducting our day to day affairs without any interference, which is the way that it works at the moment.” As the NHS emerges from coronavirus, Ms Sutcliffe said the impact on nurses would be factored in to how the regulator judged any complaints but she said the value of nursing had been demonstrated “by the bucketload” in the past year.