To be furious about the hike in registration fees for the NMC?

[FreddieMercuryforQueen]

News out today has said the NMC has raised the annual registration fee for nurses and midwives from £76 per year to £100 per year. The justification for which is given as rising costs due to increasing numbers of fitness to practice hearings. The NMC is an ineffective organisation, a law unto themselves and do very little real work in maintaining standards, wasting millions per year on hearings that are full of unsubstantiated claims and incidents that would be thrown out of any real court. I'm livid that as a healthcare worker I have to pay not only to go to work but also now have to pay more to a governing body that has very little support in the workforce for a service that is very poorly run. Sorry. Rant over.

Itchywoolyjumper. What you said. The NMC says it all on it's website, they exist to protect the public. They are not for us, the people who pay the fees, the people who they tear to shreds in their 'hearings' no they exist to protect the public from us all. I'm sick of it. I'm so disheartened.

I'm not saying we shouldn't pay fees like every other profession but the NMC are patently useless, the whole thing is a farce. They manufactured the back log of cases and now we have to pay twice to get them out of it, once in our fee rise and once as tax payers in the £20 million the government gave them to sort themselves out.

Am so glad I let my registration lapse and now have a job I love that I don't have to pay to be allowed to do. I will never work as a nurae again and that thought makes me very happy.

NURSE even.

Be grateful you're not an AHP: £64 a year to HPC & c£250 for our compulsory professional organisation.

At least we can claim the tax back....

Count yourself lucky, pharmacists pay £240 per year fees for registration and £192 for the professional body to represent them

Hobnobs, I love nursing but even I'm getting worn down with this. Its too much, I can't flog myself to death on 12 hour shifts and then come home to this nonsense.

Doctors have to pay £490 to the GMC and another £6k for nsurance if that makes you feel any better -daylight robbery if you ask me

There's a two year back log on fitness to practice hearings which apparently is why the fees have gone up. They need to employ more people to speed the hearings up.

People are complaining more, either due to an increasing compensation culture or maybe because of lower staffing levels mean less patient satisfaction/ more incidents by rushed off their feet staff. Who are paying the price.

Yanbu. The GDC charge £576 for dentists. Even when you're on maternity leave or otherwise not working. And no pro rata for p/t. I work so few hours the fee works out at slightly over a fortnight's take home wages. You can't practice without registration. If you de-register there's no guarantee they'll let you back on. Their cod requirements are onerous IMO. Their main role seems to be regulating us out of our jobs. Oh, and they also have fancy twatty offices. So yes, I feel your pain.

The fees aren' that bad in context with other professional bodies though I do still think the NMC are shit.
I'm delighted that they are stopping wasting money on s stupid card that proved other than you were registered once. It bugged the shit out of me when I was expected to photocopy all the bloody stupid things.
The live register is what we should use.

Lotsofcheese, Viperidae - we do pay a lot less but we get a much less for our money out of the NMC than many other professionals get from their bodies.

Oh, and my indemnity insurance is about £1k. And these expenses might be tax deductible, but all that means is you do t pay tax on that part of your income. No one actually pays you back your fees!

I stand corrected Bonzo, other bodies are just a crap as ours :)

The petition won't be of any use. They had their 'consultation' where I don't know of anyone that backed them and then pushed it through anyway. They're feckless.

The HPC are the worst: cannot practise without being registered with them, fees have increased from £18/year to £64. Costs increased due to increased regulation of AHP's!

And the have a bloody cheek to randomly audit registrant's "fitness to practice" - a retrospective 2 year audit of PDP - 60 pages!!!!

itchy Pharmacists complain constantly about the lack of support and representation from the professional bodies.

A couple of years ago the Royal Pharmaceutical Society was split into the GPhC for registration/standards and the RPSGB for representation as it was thought the old society focussed too much on disciplining, etc and creating the GPhC would allow them to fight on the side of pharmacists as the BMA does for doctors but they have been as conspicuous by their absence from relevant issues as they were before.

Yanbu

Just what we need after 4/5 years of pay freezes and a huge hike in pension payments

I know I'm nearly at the stage where I am paying more out in registration fees to keep up my nursing registration than I earn from actually nursing. I teach full time and do the odd bank shift to keep up my clinical skills. Every year I think Is this worth it. But then I think yes it is and one day I will be glad of it.

I didn't like dealing with them either. I was given the wrong information by some guy on their helpline that caused me to lose my registration due to a lapse of 2 weeks and I was abroad. I was devastated at the time but glad now. I was shocked that the supervisor advised me to take action and get compensation against loss of earnings. So that's what the high fees go on.

Hobnobs ditto the nhs was the worst organisation I have ever worked for. Enjoy having a job where I get paid lots and don't watch people dying of neglect on a regular basis.

YANBU. I'm a member of the HPC and a friend of mine recently had a fitness to practice hearing before they would even register him for the first time because of minor criminal convictions from 30 years ago!! They told him that it was just a formality - erm, if it's just a formality why waste money actually having a hearing FFS!!

o h god mines due in febuary when i qualified it was 40 pouinds for three years!And what do they actually do for us they said it was they inherited lots of debts from the UKCC but they were the same bloody thing even in the same building

It's going up to £125 now! Shocking.

£120, oops! Still ridiculous.