In its annual review, the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s (NMC) said it “didn’t make the progress we wanted in reducing our fitness to practise caseload”.

The NMC published its Fitness to practise annual report for 2021-22.

On its website, it commented that:

“Disappointingly, our latest reports also confirm we didn’t make the progress we wanted in reducing our fitness to practise caseload over the past year. We stabilised our caseload but it’s taking longer than planned to bring it down. We want to reassure everyone that reaching decisions quickly and fairly remains our top priority as we fully understand the impact these processes have on everyone involved.”

According to the annual report, the NMC’s caseload had been growing since early 2019 and “was exacerbated by the
pandemic which significantly affected” its operations. The growth has not been caused by more concerns being raised the NMC said because referrals have been falling year on year.

Our caseload at the end of March 2021 was 6,357, up signifcantly from 4,506 in March 2020. In 2021–2022, we stabilised the rapid growth and ended March 2022 with a caseload of 6,469. Despite this progress, we did not achieve our aim of reducing the caseload to 5,250 cases.

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