Five nursing and midwifery new rules are now in place and were laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas on 1 August 2018.

Collectively the new rules create a legislative framework which allows the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland to fulfil its statutory obligations.

Until now there was no secondary legislation under the Nurses and Midwives Act 2011 for:

• Registration;
• Qualification recognition;
• The candidate register; and 
• The structure of registers.

The new set of rules addresses these areas.

The new rules have regard to the Department of Health’s “Framework for Performance Indicators for Nursing and Midwifery”, launched by the Minister and the Chief Nurse in June 2017. The Framework sets out an approach to workforce planning for the professions of nursing and midwifery in Ireland in the future.

The Education and Training Rules in particular will give effect to the recent Department of Health “Policy for Graduate, Specialist and Advanced Nursing and Midwifery Practice”, to remove the current requirement to link ‘a person with a post’ or accredit advanced practice posts. The Board will continue to set the requirements and standards for advanced nursing and midwifery practice and registration, but will no longer accredit advanced practice posts.

The President of NMBI, Essene Cassidy said: “The enactment of these new rules is the culmination of years of work and public consultations. A huge amount of collaboration was necessary to make this happen, and I would like to thank all of our stakeholders for their input, in particular the Department of Health. The rules were a priority for the Board, and we were very committed to delivering them for the professions of nursing and midwifery. The new rules ensure that there is a coherent framework of secondary legislation which will support the NMBI in carrying out its functions under the Act.”

NMBI’s Director of Registration, Lucia Crimin said: “The new rules will provide clarity to stakeholders, applicants and registrants. They will also change how we collect minimum datasets, and NMBI’s registers will play an important role in providing the relevant collective data on nurses and midwives into the future.”

Further information on the rules can be found here.

Following on from enactment of the Nurses and Midwives Rules 2018 on June 25th the new process to register as an Advanced Nurse or Midwife Practitioner is now in place.

Details on the new process and criteria for registration can be found on NMBI’s website at the following link. 

The closing date for the next submission is September 24th 2018.

Document submission will be online and the link will be made available closer to submission date. Applicants will be alerted of this via Ezine and the latest NEWS section on the NMBI website home page.

In March 2018 NMBI published a Guidance on Sanctions document.

The Guidance on Sanctions was prepared to aid consistency and promote transparency in the interests of the public, registered nurses and registered midwives and for the assistance of:

• the Fitness to Practise Committee in recommending sanctions to the Board;
• the Board in imposing sanction(s); and
• nurses and midwives who may wish to make submissions in relation to the appropriate sanction(s) to be imposed, or who may wish to appeal the Board’s decision to the High Court.

It is proposed that a review of the document and its application in practice will be carried out at the end of 2018. Interested parties should submit any comments, observations or queries regarding the document by emailing ftp@nmbi.ie (Subject: Review of Guidance on Sanctions) by the 30 November 2018. Your feedback is welcomed.

The Board of NMBI has made decisions as to findings and sanctions arising from one complaint received under the Nurses and Midwives Act, 2011 and two complaints received under the Nurses Act, 1985.

Findings were made against Ms Ann Marie Burke (PIN 98031), Ms Ellen Teresa Anne Carroll (PIN 60270) and Ms Margaret Marian Dowling (PIN 36002).

The findings are published in full on NMBI's Findings and Decisions page.