Five nursing and midwifery new rules are now in place and have been 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.