Despite constant barriers, our chief Freedom of Information requester has been plugging away at the more reticent trusts. Here’s the latest update on our Trust referrals data campaign.

It is interesting how far some trusts go to avoid answering simple questions about the number of nurses and midwives that it has referred to the NMC.
I have been wrangling with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust for over a year. I have complained to the ICO, but the Trust pleaded that as they had 9,500 staff registered with the NMC they couldn’t possibly give an answer. (Even though one senior person should have oversight and responsibility for signing off referrals and communicating with the NMC).

When I changed tack and asked the number of referrals from each individual hospital unit, they simply aggregated my requests and refused to answer!
Today, they bizarrely sent me a response that indicated they had chosen thirty-six individual staff records and found that of this random sample there had been two referrals to the NMC in the period 2019-2023.
Now that sample is 0.38% of their NMC registered staff, so if it is in any way representative of the referrals across the entire registrant working group of 9,500 nursing and midwifery staff, we are talking about over five hundred referrals which would be a national scandal.

Watch this space.
It’s a poor trust that has no idea how many hard-working nurses and midwives it has put through such a ghastly life event as a Fitness to Practice referral, but playing the sampling game has consequences for a trust’s reputation.