A leading OH academic is urging practitioners to hurry and fill in a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) consultation on registration of qualifications that will close in the next few days.
The NMC opened a consultation in August on developing new guidance for practitioners who wish to register their qualifications within the current five-year window of completion, including the standards they will need to demonstrate as a result.
The consultation will close on 9 October, and Anne Harriss, course director at London South Bank University, has stressed it is important that OH practitioners make their views known.
“Many [practitioners], particularly those who intended on moving overseas, did not think this was of great importance to them and did not want to pay the fee involved,” Harriss said.
“Times have changed and there are implications to that decision if they choose to return to practise in the UK. The only current option is for such practitioners to undertake another SCPHN [Specialist Community and Public Health Nursing] programme.”
“I would urge all nurses to access the link and complete the survey. My experience of the NMC is that it does not move quickly, so don’t expect any changes to this process in the very near future, and the consultation period may result in no changes being made. But if we don’t participate we won’t have our voices heard.”
The NMC, in a separate development in September, outlined plans for nurses to be brought into line with doctors and go through a process of “revalidation” every three years.
Under the plan, all nurses and midwives on the register would be revalidated every three years at the point of their renewal. They would be required to continually gather evidence for this process.
More detail on the plans is available on the NMC’s website.
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