RCNi animated guide to revalidation: transcript

If you’re a nurse, a midwife or about to join the register, you may have heard about the upcoming changes to how the Nursing and Midwifery Council regulates our professions. 

This change is called revalidation.

In designing it, the NMC has spoken to patient groups, nurses and professional bodies. 

It asked some difficult questions and found that PREP, the old system for monitoring nursing performance, had a number of flaws.

Under PREP we were required only to count the number of hours we spent in practice and those spent on continuing professional development. There was no attempt to assess the quality of our learning.

In making the assumption that everyone learned at the same pace, we were taking for granted that hours spent on learning would translate into practical change.  Without showing our learning, when it came to professional development, we were asking the NMC to take our word for it. 

There are currently more than 670,000 nurses and midwives providing care in the UK. It’s a busy profession with many competing priorities, and this approach to learning simply wasn’t enough.

For this reason, revalidation will apply to all of us and the first nurses and midwives to go through the process will be those due to re-register from early 2016.

Revalidation may seem a long way off, but each of us will need to start preparing now, so that we are in a position to comply with the requirements when the time comes.

The main changes are as follows:

Under revalidation we will complete a mandatory 40hrs of continuing professional development every three years, and crucially, we will also reflect on some of our activity to ensure that our practice has improved or been updated as a result.

Some of the 40hrs can be self-directed, but some will be learning with others, which could involve completing an in-house training course or shadowing another nurse or midwife. 

Skills stay relevant through use. In order to remain registered, we will need to show that we have completed 450 hours of practice over three years or 900 hours to revalidate as both a nurse and a midwife. 

We will collect and review feedback from our managers, colleagues and patients.

This is part of a new reflective culture where nurses and midwives are encouraged to embrace feedback and view it as an opportunity to learn, to make changes and prevent mistakes from happening again.

Someone who is NMC registered and oversees our work will need to confirm we have met the requirements of revalidation. This will probably be at our appraisal where our practice is assessed against the NMC code of conduct and its values.

If the person who oversees our practice is not NMC registered, we will need their opinion to be backed up by a nurse or midwife who is familiar with our practice.

As part of the initiative, the NMC has published a new code. This now contains 25 statements by which all nurses and midwives agree to abide. 

Finally, we may be asked to present our evidence to the NMC online, providing a paper-free record of our continuing professional development.

To help collate all of this information, you can create an electronic portfolio, such as the one found on the RCNi website. This will help you to keep track of your hours and make sure that you have all of the evidence you need in one place, when you need it.

Revalidation may seem like a challenge, but by using the information and support available you will be able to demonstrate that you meet the high standards expected of our profession.

And that you are qualified to deliver the best possible care for all of our patients.

ENDS

Back to the revalidation film