Episode 15: Andrea Sutcliffe CBE, Chief Executive and Registrar, Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Institute of Regulation's Podcast

In this podcast we explore what makes a good regulation strategy – and find out why regulators must ensure their strategies are flexible and agile enough to meet the changing demands of society and modern industry.

To discuss this challenge, our guest today is Andrea Sutcliffe CBE, Chief Executive and Registrar of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the independent regulator for nurses and midwives in the UK, and nursing associates in England.

The NMC regulates over 800,000 professionals with a vision to ensure safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery practice that improves everyone’s health and wellbeing. Andrea is just starting the process of forming her second five-year strategy for the Council , having previously planned, launched and driven the last one from the moment she arrived at the organisation in 2019.

As Andrea explains in the podcast, this next strategy has been delayed by a year to now cover 2026-2031 due to the pressures of a post Pandemic workload at NMC. Clearly there has been a huge amount of change in nursing sector in that time – not least caused by the pandemic, the first ever industrial action by nurses in 2022 and of course pressure on skills in the sector caused by Brexit.

And with a General Election coming down the track this year it is unlikely we will see any less turbulence. Andrea discusses all these challenges.