I am delighted to advise you that our report on the consultation regarding the introduction of the Nursing Associate role is now available on the Health Education England website: : https://www.hee.nhs.uk/our-work/developing-our-workforce/nursing/new-support-role-nursing.
You will know the importance of this initiative, designed to build capacity to care and capability to treat across the health and social care system. Our public consultation ran from 28 January for six weeks and we received over 1,000 responses from people and organisations across health, social care, commissioning, education and policy, as well as from Assistant Practitioners, carers and Registered Nurses. Therefore, I am convinced that the outcome represents the views of a wide range of people and organisations.
I would like to express my personal thanks to everyone who took part in the consultation, sharing their views, expertise and experience. In particular, I would like to express my thanks to Jackie Smith, Chief Executive and Registrar at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) for her continued support and guidance throughout the process.
Our attention now turns to delivery. Our goal is to implement the new role and recruit 1,000 students for a January 2017 start.
We will run five events in July across England, where we will invite people and organisations to help us draw up the scope of practice for the role, and we hope you will join us. The dates and locations are set out below: we will open for bookings soon, via Eventbrite, and more information will be available on our website.
1 July Birmingham
15 July London
20 July Manchester
22 July Reading
29 July Newcastle
As always, I welcome your comments and hope that you can join us for a Twitter chat hosted by @WeNurses on 7 June (8-9pm) using the hashtag #shapeofcaring. We are also running a webinar, the details of which will be available at our website
.
Yours sincerely,
Lisa
Professor Lisa Bayliss-Pratt
Director of Nursing & Deputy Director of Education and Quality
Health Education England