The Nursing and Midwifery Council had been found failing at every level and was on their sixth CEO in six years. I was brought in January 2013, two weeks before the highly critical Francis report, where their failings around Mid-Staffordshire would be in the spotlight. (Pictured: Helene Donnelly, one of the brave nurses who spoke up about appalling standards of care at the hospital.)
- The NMC had done no preparation
- Management confidence in their internal communications ability was low (although they had some good staff)
- Media trust in the organisation was poor
- They had little positive to report except a genuine understanding of the scope of their challenges
I ensured that we were ready with a confident media plan to address these historic failings, and that we did not over-promise.
In those first weeks, management also found that their historic systems for registering overseas nurses were deficient. They did not know how many people had got onto the register fraudulently. The management took decisive action to halt overseas registration while investigating.
I presented this as what it was, a tough new management focused on patient safety. I managed the issue over more than a year while robust new systems were set up.
Fortunately, a thorough audit supported by the Government revealed reasonable confidence the issue was record keeping; the old systems, whatever their deficiencies, had in fact been followed.
I restored management confidence in the comms function – the CEO told me she now knew what good looked like – and managed the gradual turnaround in the organisation’s perception from a failure to clearly on the mend.
