The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) is one of 10 professional health and care regulators in the UK and is responsible for regulating nurses and midwives in the UK and nursing associates in England. 

Harlow Consulting was commissioned by the Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) to support a comprehensive review of their education programme standards, to help them understand potential impacts of benefits of making any changes to standards post-Brexit.  

We undertook two separate but linked research projects: 

1. a review of existing international evidence including academic research and grey literature (such as policy papers and stakeholder evidence).
2. An international benchmarking review of approaches taken to pre-registration education and training by comparable health professional regulators. 

We carried out a desk-based evidence review, to evaluate the evidence on the impact and effectiveness of the EU Directive, and alternatives, to enable the NMC to critically explore whether the requirements of the Directive are necessary to achieve the standards of proficiency to be admitted to the register. This was undertaken via a rapid evidence assessment (REA) to identify, assimilate and report on evidence within a short period of time available to complete the research.  

Multiple databases were used to search for relevant and credible sources of evidence. In total, 105 sources (academic sources and grey literature) were used in this report. The academic evidence used was quality assessed on criteria such as the research design, analysis methods and results. The benchmarking review compared four professions and eight international comparator countries.  

 Our findings were synthesised with conclusions from a qualitative stakeholder engagement carried out concurrently by Traverse. The results enabled the NMC to work with subject matter expert groups to review and propose certain changes including increasing the number of simulation learning hours for nursing students and expanding the variety of placement settings available for midwifery students. These proposed changes were then subject to further consultation.