Fitness to practise dashboard launched by NMC to highlight midwifery cases

The nursing regulator has launched a new interactive dashboard to provide data about midwifery fitness to practise (FtP) cases.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has launched the Midwifery Data Dashboard to help the maternity care sector to ‘understand and address recurring themes when midwifery care goes wrong’.

It will provide data and insight from the regulator’s FtP processes, allowing users to see the most common allegation types involving midwives. This can be expanded to sub-categories involving specific description of the concerns.

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The interactive dashboard can also be filtered to show the allegations raised most frequently by employers or the public across the UK and in each of the four countries.

Paul Rees, chief executive and registrar, said the dashboard will ‘help improve safety’ as when care ‘falls below standards’ it can have ‘devastating consequences’.

‘Every day there are midwives delivering safe, kind and equitable care across the four countries of the UK,’ he said.

‘But there are also too many occasions when midwifery care falls below the standards that women and families expect, which can have absolutely devastating consequences.

‘Our new Midwifery Data Dashboard will help our partners to improve safety by targeting the recurring themes in fitness to practise concerns.

‘By highlighting the concerns that are most commonly raised with us about midwives on the register, as well as those which most frequently result in us taking regulatory action, we are supporting the sector to better embed NMC standards, to improve safety and outcomes.’

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The dashboard has already been presented to key stakeholders at the NMC Midwifery Strategic Advisory Group (MSAG) which includes chief midwifery officers, unions and representative bodies, educators and service users with lived experience of maternity care.

The moves comes as amid a taskforce being launched to deliver ‘urgent action’ on maternity care. Duncan Burton, chief nursing officer (CNO) for England, has recently been appointed to the taskforce.

He is one of 17 members confirmed for a new maternity and neonatal taskforce, chaired by the health and social care secretary, to help ensure ‘safer, more equitable care’ for women, babies and families.

Recently, the NMC also teamed up with General Medical Council (GMC) to launch two new resources that aim to provide practical advice and support for those working in maternity care and tackle challenges within the sector.

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These include a new page on the NMC website that will offer a series of case studies to promote good practice and lessons to learn, as well as a new maternity page on the GMC’s ‘ethical hub’ part of its website.

Last month, interim findings from the independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation revealed that maternity and neonatal services in England are failing to deliver consistent, safe and equitable care, with staffing pressures and structural racism among the most serious concerns.