Today Ishbel Straker begins a campaign about the issues she has experienced when referred to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). She has told LBC she has been subjected to “vindictive, calculated and malicious” behaviour by the NMC after whistleblowing on a healthcare provider.
Ishbel Straker runs her own private practise in Liverpool, but, having been referred to the regulator, she says the NMC has gone to extensive lengths to silence her and damage her professional reputation after she dared to question their processes.
Ishbel told LBC: “They’ve gone to a lot of effort to try to keep me quiet. It feels like there’s been an agenda, and… it’s all come from me saying that the processes of the NMC are unfair and are impactful to individuals.”
In the most recent Fitness to Practice annual report the NMC outline that black or mixed ethnicity (BAME) registrants are more likely to be referred than their white colleagues and that consistently higher numbers are being referred from members of the public. It also comes as the number of registrants taking their own lives while going through ‘fitness to practice’ proceedings continues to rise.
NMCWatch founder Cathryn Watters said: “People are taking two to five years to go through process, by which time, if they’ve been lucky enough to continue in work, they’ve got past whatever went wrong and demonstrated that they are fit. Or they’ve been put into a process for something quite minor but then have been unable to gain any employment during that time, so by the time their case comes to be heard they are unfit to practise, but the process has made them unfit.”
“They (NMC) also need to be looking at the numbers of suicides that have happened during FTP… since 2016 it’ll be 33 nurses who’ve died by suicide before their cases have completed. You know, it’s got to stop.”
Ishbel Straker is a British-registered nurse. She is founder and director of I Straker Consultants Ltd, a mental health consultancy based in Liverpool. She is a registered mental health nurse and Independent Nurse Prescriber and worked in the NHS holding senior positions across many sectors. Ishbel’s company was set up in 2020 and offers a wide range of mental health support services both to individuals, NHS and private sector employers. She has pioneered a service for young people requiring assessment for neurodiversity, potentially reducing harm and delay in instigating additional support required which takes many years to access on the NHS.
Ishbel has faced challenges setting up a new service, but as a professional she has reflected, learnt and put improvements in place at every opportunity. Like many of our group, she has raised concerns around risks to patient safety throughout her career, and whistleblew to the NMC and CQC prior to her own referral. With events escalating on the poor handling of her own case has had to whistleblow about both these organisations themselves.
Ishbel completely supports the need for regulation but what she and NMCWatch are trying to change is the poor manner in which fitness to practice investigations are being carried out. Most concerning is the NMC’s lawyer-led focus on ‘pursuit of case’, rather than the pursuit of truth, and their unwillingness to understand how this increases the risk to public.
To date, the NMC refuse to consider a formal policy on vexatious referrals, they still assess all referrals to them on merit. However, every other healthcare regulator does recognise the element of vexatious referrals and formalises this in their policies.
Through her media campaign Ishbel hopes to highlight the failings of both the NMC and CQC, and to show how the wrong investigations cause additional risk to the public.
With contributions from Chris Chambers, LBC Correspondent North West.