The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is launching a new ‘case weighting tool’ for fitness to practise (FtP) referrals, to improve case allocation and reduce workload pressure on its staff.
The tool will be launched later this month and aims to ‘allocate cases’ in a way that would deliver a more ‘equitable and manageable workload’.
It comes as the NMC continues to face a FtP caseload of more than 6,000 and as concerns about the pressures faced by NMC staff managing FtP cases was highlighted in a recent review.
The highly damning Nazir Afzal and Rise Associates report into the regulator’s culture warned of ‘high levels of stress’ among NMC staff ‘feeling under immense pressure to get through the backlog’ of FtP referrals.
Matthew McClelland, executive director of strategy and insight at the NMC, said the regulator was ‘consistently receiving’ more referrals than it expected at the beginning of the year, and outlined how the new tool will help ease its FtP backlog.
‘As we move forward, our investigation teams are going to be supported by a new case weighting tool, which will be launching next month, and that’s been built with feedback from our teams,’ he told an NMC Council meeting earlier this week.
‘Essentially, workload will be allocated with the complexity of cases in mind, rather than simply a number of cases.
‘That’s going to really help us with the feedback we have from our teams we have about the pressure of individual workloads,’ he explained.
The NMC has said it is working to reduce staff workload and improve hearing times, with the aim to have closed or progressed all previously unallocated FtP cases by January to March 2025.
In the same period, the regulator aims to increase monthly FtP committee hearing decisions from 70 to 90 overall.
The NMC’s FtP caseload was 6,329 for August 2024, up from 6,221 the month before. Less than a third of cases within the backlog had been seen within the ‘timeliness target’ last month.
In July, the NMC failed to meet its FtP target for another year.
Lay NMC council member Deborah Harris-Ugbomah told the council meeting this week that it was important to recognise the pressure that FtP referrals put on NMC staff, adding that improvements to referrals should not focus on caseload alone.
‘I do feel that there is a need to do something to ensure that the FtP team are not facing undue pressure as we try to bring down the caseload as well as refresh the process,’ she said.
The regulator last month established a ‘safeguarding hub’ to ensure every FtP referral received in screening will be examined through a ‘safeguarding lens’.
Also during the meeting, lay council member Sue Whelan Tracy warned that ‘referrals have grown at a rate that was not in the plan’.
And she stressed ‘it is absolutely crucial’ to maintain high quality procedures while also maintaining ‘the timeliness of work’.
Ijeoma Omambala KC’s upcoming reports into the NMC are due to focus on FtP and equality, diversity and improvement (EDI) within the regulator and are expected for later this year
