Frank Feighan (Sligo-Leitrim, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this important issue. The NMBI is the regulatory body for the nursing and midwifery professions. Its role in setting standards and providing guidance for approximately 79,000 registered nurses and midwives focuses on public safety. The board is an independent body answerable to the Oireachtas with responsibility for ensuring that it has the financial capacity to fulfil all of its legal obligations.

The NMBI has a number of statutory obligations: to protect the integrity of the practice of the professions of nursing and midwifery, to protect the public, and to ensure public safety. It performs important functions in setting education standards, approving training programmes, and investigating complaints against registrants.

My Department is responsible for the oversight and governance of the NMBI, but it has no role in setting or approving fees. The board has a statutory responsibility to ensure it discharges its legal obligations within the financial resources available to it while maximising efficiencies and income generation in keeping with best financial governance practice.

Under the Nurses and Midwives Act 2011, the NMBI is required to be self-financing. This is primarily achieved through the annual retention fee paid by each registrant, which was set at €100 in 2014 and has not been increased since. The income from this fee and other sources provides the funding required by the board to carry out its statutory obligations to protect the integrity of the practice of the professions of nursing and midwifery and to protect the public. Like every other healthcare regulator, the board continues to face considerable costs arising from the way the laws regulating the professions operate and from handling fitness-to-practise complaints. The annual retention fee was set by the board.

Among the NMBI's core functions are maintaining the register of nurses and midwives and a candidate register for student nurses and midwives; setting the standards for the education and training of nurses and midwives; approving the programmes of education necessary for registration and monitoring these programmes on an ongoing basis; supporting registrants by providing appropriate guidance on professional conduct and ethics for registered nurses and midwives; and holding inquiries into complaints about registrants.

The NMBI makes decisions relating to the imposition of sanctions on registered nurses and midwives who have findings made against them, and advises the Minister and the public on all matters of relevance relating to NMBI functions.

It is vital that the NMBI remains independent to allow it to regulate the professions of nursing and midwifery, as defined by the 2011 Act. The work of the NMBI over the next two months will concentrate on collecting the registration data of all nurses and midwives, and that is important for our entire health service. The registration process is open until 31 January 2021.

As the Deputy said, during the current Covid-19 pandemic, it has been important that we carry out our duties in a well-regulated and timely manner. Staff in the NMBI have worked throughout the pandemic to ensure we satisfy our statutory requirements to ensure nurses and midwives can be registered throughout this time.

Again, I pay tribute and thank the nurses and, indeed, student nurses for the work they have done through this pandemic. The Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, has confirmed to me that he is looking into the request that nursing home registration fees paid to the NMBI by nurses can be repaid in another way. We are looking into it and seeing what can be done. We are looking for €7 million per year to get this resolved. We need to find it somewhere but we are looking at that fund so those payments can be reimbursed or repaid by Government in some other way. We hope to have a decision in the coming weeks.

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