As the year comes to an end, so too does my time as President of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland. It has been a privilege and an honour to hold this esteemed position and I am optimistic as I now handover to a new President in 2023.

I am proud of what we have achieved for nurses and midwives, and the wider healthcare sector during my 10 years on the Board, and having served as President for the past seven years.

As a registered nurse, my aim was to ensure that we always had our registrants and the need to protect people using services at the heart of all decisions we made as a Board. I am delighted to say that I believe we achieved that.

Throughout my time on the Board, the organisation has been on a journey of transformation. At the time of my joining, the Nurses and Midwives Act 2011 had come into effect which saw the establishment of the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland to replace An Bord Altrainis and made a number of changes to our role as the regulator of the professions, including reducing the size of the Board from 29 to 23 persons with a lay majority. It also recognised nursing and midwifery as two distinct professions for the first time in Ireland, and we have strived to protect and promote those two professions. We have adapted our complaints process to allow faster initial screening of complaints and to speed up the scheduling of fitness to practise inquiries. We digitised the annual registration renewal process to make it easier for registrants and to obtain critical data and information on the over 84,000 registered nurses and midwives in Ireland. We have trialed new initiatives to process applications as quickly as possible. We have also regularly updated and revised our Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics to ensure it continues to provide the professions with the most up-to-date legislative and guidance changes. We continue to work with the Department of Health and the Health Service Executive (HSE) to implement the recent findings of the Expert Review Body on Nursing and Midwifery.

My proudest moment however was how we, as a healthcare community, pulled together and adapted to Covid-19. Nurses and midwives ran towards the pandemic, using their skills to provide essential care in difficult conditions, leading the rollout of the vaccination programmes, and upskilling where necessary to take on expanded roles. Students were supported to complete their nursing and midwifery programmes and achieve registration. I want to sincerely thank our registered nurses and our registered midwives for their incredible contribution during the Covid-19 pandemic, their dedication to patient care and to supporting our students during their clinical placements during the challenging times.

During all of this, NMBI’s Board remained focused on our role in providing leadership and ensuring we regulated effectively. The pandemic has shown what we can achieve when we work together and I hope that this collaboration continues in the future.

There have been 100 years of professional regulation for nurses and midwives in Ireland, and I believe that we can have pride in our professions, and pride in being one of the longest professionally regulated group. This allows the Board of NMBI to continue to ensure we can adapt to the evolving healthcare environment both globally and locally, and regulate effectively, while upholding the highest standards in education, training and professional conduct.

I would urge all nurses and midwives to get involved in the work of NMBI. You have so much to contribute either at Board, committee or staff level. Your skills, knowledge and experience are valuable to informing everything that we do, and it has been one of the proudest achievements of my career to date to serve as President. 

I would like to thank all of our registrants for what they do on a daily basis throughout our healthcare services. I would also like to thank the Board and committee members, past and present, and all of our stakeholders who it has been a pleasure to work alongside over the past 10 years. 2022 sees a change in Board membership as 11 members go out of office with me and I would like to thank them for their outstanding contribution to the work of the Board. I extend a warm welcome to the new members who will join the Board and wish them every success as they settle into their roles on the Board. Finally, a huge thank you to our CEO Sheila McClelland, the management team and the staff of NMBI who have supported the Board to complete our work, and for the dedication to your roles and to the organisation.

I wish you all a very Happy Christmas and New Year.

Essene Cassidy

2022 was another challenging year for nurses and midwives, and I would like to thank all registrants and students for their hard work and dedication as they continue to provide person-centred care.

2023 will no doubt bring with it new challenges but here at NMBI, we look forward to meeting these head on through implementation of our Statement of Strategy 2023-2025.

As the regulator, our role is to enhance patient safety by supporting nurses and midwives to deliver safe care. We are focused on delivering on our statutory remit and over the coming three years we also aim to position ourselves as enablers of system-wide change.

Since we launched our last Statement of Strategy in 2020, the healthcare landscape has changed significantly, and particularly during Covid-19. There is no doubt that nurses and midwives in Ireland have shown their commitment during these changes, as have my colleagues at NMBI. We will work proactively to continue to support our registrants in providing the highest standards of care through improved registration, education and complaints processes.

In a series of events throughout the country in 2022, the NMBI team had the opportunity to meet with registrants across each division of the Register. This provided us with valuable insights and we look forward to expanding this continued engagement and partnership with our registrants, colleagues and stakeholders next year.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing President, Essene Cassidy, for her exemplary years of service. She was first elected to the Board as a public health representative in 2012, and over the years since, particularly during her Presidency, she has represented NMBI with distinction both nationally and internationally. She will be greatly missed within the organisation and by stakeholders.

I would also like to wish our 11 Board members who are stepping down this month for their contribution and dedication over their time in office and wish them well in the future.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our registered nurses and midwives, and our partners in Government, education and business a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Season’s Greetings,

Sheila McClelland

The 2023 annual registration renewal continues and to date over 25,000 registrants have completed the process.

The renewal window will remain open until Tuesday, 14 February 2023; however, we encourage registrants to login and renew as soon as possible to avoid any delays in processing during peak hours.

The annual renewal process must be completed through our online portal, MyNMBI. Renewing your registration is easy and should only take a few minutes to complete.

To assist registrants through the annual renewal process, we have created a number of useful guides and we advise that registrants view these before renewing their registration. The guides can be accessed through the links below and are also available on our website.

• Annual Renewal video guide
• 2023 Annual Registration Renewal Guide
• Frequently Asked Questions

For those who require assistance to complete the renewal process, please call 0818 200 116 (Monday-Friday 9am to 5:30pm) or email our Registration Department at regservices@nmbi.ie.

Please note that due to Christmas holidays, our offices and call line will be closed between 24 and 27 December 2022, and 31 December 2022 to 2 January 2023.

Please see opening hours over the Christmas period below.

We are pleased to announce that the latest site inspection summary reports for University College Cork (UCC) and Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT) are now published.

The site inspections were conducted between March and May of this year and were approved by the NMBI Board in September.

As part of our mandate to protect the public, we assess and approve all education programmes in nursing and midwifery across the country, conducting site inspections of university and college departments, and their partner hospitals and health services to ensure high standards of nursing and midwifery education and practice. 

All site inspection reports of education bodies and associated healthcare partners are published on our website and available to the public.

The inspection reports provide an in-depth look at each undergraduate programme leading to registration and include a summary of the commendations, conditions and recommendations for best practice in professional education.

We would like to thank both education bodies and their associated healthcare partners for their collaboration.

The reports are available to view on our website.

Our Board held its last meeting of 2022 on 1 December as our President and 11 Board members go out of office.

Departing are:

• Essene Cassidy (President), elected from the practice of public health nursing, who served for 10 years
• Denise Lawler, nominated by the universities, who served for seven years
• Catherine Cocoman, elected from the practice of psychiatric nursing, who served for five years
• Liam Hamill, elected from the practice of intellectual disability nursing, who served for five years
• Mary Gorman, elected from the practice of midwifery, who served for five years
• Eileen Kelly, elected from the practice of care of older persons, who served for five years
• Colm O’Herlihy, nominated by the Medical Council, who served for four years
• Anne Horgan, nominated by Coru, the Health and Social Care Professionals regulator, who served for four years
• Michael Rigby, nominated by HIQA, who served for the past year
• Mark Blake-Knox, appointed public representative, who served for 10 years
• Denis Murphy, appointed public representative, who served for nine years
• John Horan, appointed public representative, who served for three years.

We would like to thank and acknowledge all members for their contribution at Board and committee level over their time in office, and wish them all the best in the time ahead.

New Board members will be appointed in January.