As the new year began the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) rang the changes. At the end of December 2018, the RCN announced the results of its Council elections for 12 posts that represent the four different UK constituencies. The Council is made up of one representative each from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and one from each of England's nine regions. It also includes a member to represent healthcare practitioners and one for students, who were elected separately.
The RCN Council provides leadership and direction for the RCN. It ensures that the College always has a clear vision and a strategic plan, it acts as a guardian of the RCN's assets and as a Council holds RCN management to account. It is responsible for ensuring that the RCN delivers its statutory purposes through its Royal Charter and Standing Orders. It also has to ensure that the RCN is compliant with trade union (as one of the largest trade unions in the country) and company legislation. The affairs and activity of the College and the making of decisions and delegating authority for the day-to-day affairs of the College are also key responsibilities of the Council.
The appointment of the Chief Executive and General Secretary (undertaken by the Council) effectively delegates the daily running of the organisation; the agreement of key performance indicators and holding the management to account for their delivery are key components of the Council's work. These activities should not be taken lightly as the RCN represents over 435 000 fee-paying members (providing £73.9 million each year) (RCN, 2018). The RCN has learnt only too recently that the membership can make known its unhappiness with how the RCN is run.
It is time that the RCN now became ‘an organisation with a memory’, as the NHS promised it would be in 2000 (Department of Health, 2000). That report (still pertinent today) focused on how NHS organisations and healthcare systems as a whole can understand and learn from safety incidents. Setting out to understand what was known about the scale and nature of the serious failures in the RCN that resulted in a vote of no confidence and examining how the RCN might learn from those failures is key to restoring confidence in the organisation. Analysis of events should be informed not only by evidence from the membership but also by the expertise and experience of other organisations such as other Royal Colleges and trade unions. The findings should be used to modernise the RCN's processes for understanding error by addressing a key set of goals: to create unified reporting and communication mechanisms, support an open learning culture, ensure that lessons learnt are applied and changes made and to more broadly embrace the voice of the membership. Learning is something the RCN should put high up on the list of priorities as it stays true to promotion of the professional standing and interests of members of the nursing profession. The Council must now ask: is the RCN able to remain accountable to two regulators, the Privy Council for its Royal College Status and the Certification Office for Trade Unions Status, as well as offering a service to its membership?
As well as a new Council, the President and Deputy President have been voted in by the membership. There are, as the President has noted, many challenges ahead for nursing, there is a need to pull together, putting the profession at the forefront and facing up to the challenges. The President has said her first priority internally is to look at governance and communication in the RCN; these are the two areas where the RCN was criticised during the recent pay deal fiasco.