I think proud is the word I would use to describe how I feel about the professions of nursing and midwifery in 2020.

Everything shifted this year for nurses and midwives. You stepped up and rallied on the front line for patients. You responded so quickly, you re-skilled and you embraced technology. As a group we moved light years in the space of a few short months. I am so proud of what we have achieved and the way we worked together as a healthcare community.

The job that nurses and midwifes do is important and as your regulator we aim to continue to support the important education, health and administrative stakeholders from across the system that support the work you do. We will also continue to provide the mechanisms and guidance needed to help you to develop and continue to deliver the very best and the safest care through this pandemic and beyond.

Our future

As a Board, we have been determined since the start of this pandemic to ensure that any emergency measures that were put in place would not affect the ability of nursing and midwifery students to complete their training and achieve registration. I am particularly proud of the broad collaboration of stakeholders from across the healthcare and education sector who worked with us to achieve this, and look forward in the months ahead to working again with them to maintain the supernumerary status for students and ensure their timely progression to registration.

To all our resilient students who have had to walk an unknown path and have embraced the opportunity to grow and contribute at a time of immense need, thank you sincerely for everything you have helped us to achieve.

Business as usual

While our work associated with the pandemic response has kept us busy this year, I am happy that we were also able to continue to make progress in our business and be one of the first regulators in the health sector to launch an online registration system, MyNMBI. Over the coming months, we will continue to add to and develop MyNMBI, launching the education module next year. I would like to thank everyone in the organisation and the larger NMBI family who has been involved in this project and the digitisation of other processes.

Supporting the development of NMBI

It is through the contributions of many that we function as a modern regulator. Several of these contributors have left our Board in December. I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our public interest appointees Pat Dolan, Martin Higgins and Dermot Manning for their two terms; elected representatives Breda Liston and Karen Canning for their one term; HSE appointee Liam Minihan for his one term and Director of Nursing appointee Karen Greene for her input over the past two years. Your time, commitment and considerable efforts were very much appreciated.

I would like to welcome back Lorraine Clarke Bishop who has been re-elected along with Louise Kavanagh McBride and Laura Sahm who have been re-appointed for a second term and extend a warm welcome to newly elected representatives Joseph Shalbin Kallarakkal and Marian Vaughan, I look forward to your unique inputs over the next four years.

In conclusion, I think it is safe to say that as we got ready to celebrate the WHO designated Year of the Nurse and Midwife this time last year we really did not know or could not have anticipated the path that we would travel. We made our path this year by walking it and at the risk of over-using the word proud, I am particularly PROUD of what we achieved together.

My hope now as the year closes is that you have a happy, safe and healthy Christmas.

With every best wish for 2021.

Essene Cassidy

President, NMBI