In case you weren’t aware of the NMC’s plan to increase annual registration fees from the current £76 to £120 as of 01/01/2013 (which you can find details of here) an epetition has been set up here calling for the DoH to carry out a review of the NMC and this decision.

I know a lot of these epetition things come to nothing but its only a few minutes of your time.

Any non-nurses who’d like to lend their support would be greatly appreciated too.

My name added…even though my employer pays my NMC fees for me, it still sucks what the NMC are doing, not to mention a real kick in the teeth for nurses at a time when pay is frozen.

My signature added, had no idea that this plan was in the pipeline. I’m coming to the end of my 2nd year of training and its looking increasingly bleak to firstly obtain a job when I qualify nevermind making a decent living if I do manage it….REALLY should have done that engineering degree instead!

76 quid? your having a laff i could get two gluten free loaves of bread for that. the NHS mob want to get a grip and pay the real cost for stuff.
76 quid for professional membership is far too cheap unless you feel its only worth 76 quid? us plumbers pay £180pa and have to re qualify fully every five years.. i wonder how many nurses could retake and pass thier exams?

totalshell – on a good earner are you? Nurses are constantly training and yes I’m sure nearly all of them could retake their exams.

totalshell = totalarse!

Done, my wife is a nurse and the £76 creeps up on us, let alone the £120.

added, I don’t think the £200 odd I pay to the HPC makes any difference to my profession, so if the NMC is anything like the HPC it is not worth the extra £44.

Added my signature as Mrs Luke has just finished year 2 at uni so will be paying the fee in a year or so.

I find it disgusting considering their ineptitude at keeping their register updated

Example:

My OH (A nurse) has a direct debit set up and they took her subscription but didn’t update the register to indicate she’d paid. She was unable to work for a week and faced a disciplinary from work through no fault of her own.
After a number of phone calls and after being on hold for an eternity she got her details updated and was able to work. No apology from the NMC: nothing!

STRIKE!!!!

On the plus side, at least it’s not >£400/yr + thousands in insurance + the responsibility of running a hospital as the most senior doctor after 9pm. For the same pay as a nurse working 12 hours a week less than me.

DOI – not a bitter doctor “in training”. Oh no.

Not forgetting the 2x£200/yr that I pay to be a member of professional bodies, that I had to pass some very difficult exams for. At a cost of £1800. Out of my own pocket. Exams that are compulsory for my job.

Some days I wish I wasn’t a doctor…

For the same pay as a nurse working 12 hours a week less than me.

Nurses do more work than Doctors.

£380 per year plus hpc reg at £40 for being a Podiatrist…nurses get off lightly IMO (& my mrs is a nurse)
any increase is bad but to be expected in these penny pinching times

Nurses don’t earn that much and cop a lot of flack unfairly. Most are taking on more and more responsibility and carrying out a lot more tasks that doctors used to do and getting no more pay for it just loads of stress. Oh btw doctors often claim and get financially rewarded for procedures that nurses carry out too.
If I were a doctor I’d be thinking that nurses will soon be clinically on a par – and where will the saving be made financially in the future?

For all the naysayers, if you understood how utterly F***ing useless the NMC are as a governing body you would understand why the rise in fees causes such a response from nurses.

You are effectively paying to have your name on a register and nothing else, they aren’t worth 76 pence never mind £76.

Unlike other professional bodies that support their members, throughout all the recent changes in the NHS and all those before the NMC have remained silent and ineffective.

Petition signed

hear hear, ben.

You are effectively paying to have your name on a register and nothing else,

and they can’t even get that right!

And it’s not even a pre paid envelope when you return your documents and a paper registration card when confirmation eventually arrives!

Are you claiming tax relief on this amount? You’re perfectly entitled to have your tax code adjusted to reflect paying into this. You can claim up to 6 years worth of tax back on these subscriptions. If you ask your employer to take it out of your wage direct it will have minimal impact on your net wage. It would certainly be less painful than having it paid then having to cough up again. At least it would soften the blow??

legolam – Member

On the plus side, at least it’s not >£400/yr + thousands in insurance + the responsibility of running a hospital as the most senior doctor after 9pm

Errmm – running the hospital? You might be the senior doc on site but seniors will be on call and also the senior nurses will actually be running the place out of hours 🙂

nurses poorly paid? the two sisters who take my INR each month drive a lexus and a merc. ones on 4 day week preparing for retirement in 18 months..
poorly paid nurses went out with wilson and heath.

Perhaps contact the NMC and make use of their complaints procedure, for which you pay for as part of your subscription.

And question them on how the subs are spent,fancy offices, comapny cars, high paid management, etc.

totalarse – is this the example you’re giving to represent all nurses? You have no idea!!

As a plumber I’m guessing that your income will easily exceed any nurses and what kind of responsibility and threat of litigation do you have when it comes to saving lives?

I hope that you never injure yourself or have to go to hospital but if you do maybe talk with these professionals that are looking after you and caring for you – it’s a thankless task and hard graft.

And question them on how the subs are spent,fancy offices, comapny cars, high paid management, etc

Well, we are going back 14 years but I once attended a meeting/dinner at the NMC HQ as a student representative for Leeds Nursing School and we dined in style, and I mean style-silver service, carpaccio of beef, aged wines.

While still registered, I now work in a clinical role for a global devices company and as profit making organisation we never eat like that….difference is it’s our money to spend.

P.S our company clears £18 millon PA in the UK, the NMC does £81 million

The problem is that the NMC isn’t answerable to the people who actually pay for it and, as an organisation, it’s remit isn’t even to support nurses and midwifes other than as an aside to their primary role, ‘protection’ of the public.

Effectively nurses and midwifes have to pay for an organisation that will always lay the burden of proof against them in a dispute, no matter how groundless said dispute may be.

Seems a big rise. I’m sodding off back to Oz though and don’t plan on coming back. FWIW The Australian nursing board (AHPRA) are no better. I’m in the process of re-registering with them as my reg lapsed due to coming back to the UK. In the space of 11 months they have lost any information regarding my registration with them and I have to do a full application again.

Poorly paid? Yikes. Let’s not even go there eh?

@highclimber and TJ – I’m fairly certain we all work as a team, with different roles. No one does more or less, just different. But, if you want me to down tools midway through my nightshift and allow all these senior nurses who are actually “running the hospital” in my stead to get on and do that, be my guest. My guess is they’ll be “just not happy”. 😉

Anyhoo, my point (which was rather argumentatively put, for various reasons) was that the NMC fees are currently not in line with other “professional” bodies’ fees. That may mean that I pay too much, or you pay too little. You decide.

(FWIW, my opinion is the former)

Docs get a lot more from their subscriptions 🙂

When I first qualified I paid a once and for all registration fee. later it was decided fees were every 3 years now its every year and going up.

TJ. – show me what I get from the GMC for the £420 I paid last year. No support, a slow and inefficient system, no clear policy on revalidation. A piece of paper and a couple of glossy brochures.

Please get your facts right for a change.
That NMC fee looks a bargain to me. And it will be tax allowable.

+1 stoatsbrother. We get nothing for our money other than the privilege of getting struck off. When I qualified (2006), the fee was ~£100. Not sure that my little piece of paper has quadrupled in value over the last 6 years…

signed for Mrs B (midwife)

Signed! Qualified in April. Working in a Nursing home due to the lack of jobs in the NHS. Trying to convince my missus a move to Australia might be a good thing. £76 was bad enough.

$100 a year for a Nurses practicing certificate here in NZ. My Employer pays it. Without it I can’t work so would earn nothing. Given what other professions have to pay as highlighted above I’ve no complaints.

Well screw this I’m going into medical research and not the clinical side.

Seems like after 10 years in medicine you want to blow your brains up the bathroom wall.

Well as a teacher i had to pay the GTC and it had been disbanded!

Legolam, the keywords in your post are “in training” I think you’ll do well in the next few years.

I’m a fully qualified doctor, and have been for 6 years. “in training” just means im not a consultant. And there is no guarantee I’ll ever be one. My boyfriend, who is a surgeon, will be unemployed in August because there are no jobs. 6 years at Uni, 2 degrees, a postgrad qualification and 6 years of working in the NHS “in training” down the pan. We have job insecurity just like everyone else.

Although we haven’t yet been made to pay a disbanded organisation, that’s just nuts!

fees going up?

how i feel now:

how i’ll feel when they send me my renewal notice:

i dont really want to do any other job, doesn’t really matter about the pay, we get to make a positive difference in vulnerable people’s lives instead of the other 99.9% (this figure may or may not have been made up on the spot)of jobs out there that are focussed on taking money from the average citizen for the bank balance of the rich.

Nurse here.

I don’t know whether or not this is a bad thing. I think for the least costly annual fees, the NMC are a lot more ‘hands off’ with us than my other medical/PAM/therapist/psychology colleagues’ professional bodies though.

A few more observations:

-Nurses are the largest professional body (as in one requiring proper registration) in the UK are they not? Even if you leave out the midwives 😉 I wonder if the numbers should make it slightly cheaper: there are always going to be overheads whethr you run a professional body for 500 people or 50,000. I expect after a certain number the costs ‘flatten out’ as you still have to do disciplinaries/fitness for practice etc.

-This is the 2nd really massive increase in fees since I qualified. Having not been ‘in trouble’, the only improved service I get now from the NMC that i didn’t seven years ago before the previous massive hike in fees is some newslettery emails. Always had stuff in the post from them since I very first registered.

-The NMC are right in their own blurb that disciplinary/fitness to practice hearings are indeed on the rise. What is not clear is whether people are better now at reporting poor practice that has always gone on, or whether we as a group of workers are getting it badly wrong more often.

-I can’t believe that the recent vacancy freezes, understaffing and rise in acuity/risk of the ‘average’ inpatient in large hospitals has not had an impact in the number of incidents as people try harder and harder to care for iller people with fewer colleagues to help them. It is clear anecdotally and from bigger stories that individual nurses complaining to their managers that they are understaffed to provide even basic care and feeding often gets you nowhere. I do not see the NMC supporting these individuals.

-What i don’t see is the NMC investing our fees in preventing incidents either by pushing for improved in-service training or more favourable conditions of care for our patients.

where’ve you been hiding S&J?

Brakes – I injured myself quite badly mtbing, laid off the bike for a fair while as a result and got out of the habit.

On top of this my life has taken quite a change in direction so I’ve not had much time to think about getting back into it but as I said the other day, I will be hoping to turn that around.

Thanks for asking.