I love being a nurse and have been committed to advancing the value of nursing throughout my career, both in my day job and as a proud member of the Â鶹ÊÓƵ (RCN). Being an active member of the RCN offers many opportunities to lead, influence, and shape nursing, both informally and formally. This can be done by being part of a professional forum, through roles such as a learning representative or steward, and by holding elected roles, such as serving on the branch executive or on committees like the student committee, nursing support worker committee, and trade union committees or as an elected governance representative for a Region. I have served in several RCN roles throughout my career and am currently the elected Council member for the South East Region. As with many jobs, it’s not until you start doing it that you really get to understand it! So I want to share some insights I have gained from serving as a Council member and how we can use our nursing skills in this governance role.
One of the first things you come to understand in the role is how complex the RCN is, how much it does for nurses, individually and as a profession, lots of which we, as members, do not see, as much happens behind the scenes, and just how central members are to the RCN's work.
The leadership and governance of the RCN are the Council's role; members rely on Council members to fulfil their roles well, so that nurses and the public can feel the benefit and impact of the RCN. The important thing to understand then is that the RCN is a multimillion-pound organisation; its Council is equivalent to the board of an NHS trust or a private-sector organisation. As with these organisations, the executives of the RCN are members of the Council, but as a trade union, the non-executive function is fulfilled by the elected Council members. Unlike the NHS and private-sector organisations, only the elected members have voting rights on decisions. The Council has a collective responsibility, through its leadership, to ensure that it advances the mission of the RCN and its strategic delivery plan, safeguards the integrity of its governance, and promotes the interests of nurses and the wider public. Being a Council member with voting rights is therefore both a great honour and a substantial responsibility.
Although our role on Council is to act as an advocate for nursing and nurses, we are not there to directly represent our region's interests; however, Branch and Regional Board issues do inform our understanding of what is affecting nurses and nursing. In our governance role, our focus is on ensuring effective leadership and delivery of the RCN's strategy, policies and functions across all four Countries. You also come to realise that it is the two sub-committees of the Council, the Trade Union and Professional Nursing committees, that do the majority of the work through the delegated responsibility given to them by the Council. The Council, therefore, relies on these committees to design and develop the work programmes to fulfil much of the Council's functions. Council’s role is to sign off on the delegated work programmes and to agree on them, or request further development or actions needed to deliver the work effectively in response to changes in health and social care provision within society or to national politics. We do this collectively, with each member contributing to the decisions by exercising scrutiny through their professional judgment and career experience, and by being informed by their Regional Boards' perspective in the interest of all members in all countries, not just the Region we represent.
It becomes clear from the role just how involved members are in leading and shaping the RCN and where and how it focuses its work, from local campaigns, support in the workplace and shaping national policy. For example, the Corridor Care Campaign was born out of a resolution proposed, presented and debated by members at Congress. With support from the RCN policy, nursing, and communications teams, Corridor Care has now been brought to the national attention of the public and politicians.
But it also becomes clear just how few members are active and how reliant we are on those few. Encouraging members to be more active is a significant challenge, particularly given the many pressures of nursing work, regardless of the sector or discipline. As a Council, we know that active members are essential to the College's effectiveness, and we have tasked the Activist Academy with increasing member engagement and supporting members in leading and shaping nursing locally. We have also asked for a greater focus on engaging with and recruiting health care support workers and student nurses, who will be the future leaders of our profession.
All Council members are involved in the governance of the College in other ways, as we are also assigned to supporting committees, such as the Governance, Audit, and Remuneration committees. These committees undertake the detailed work of ensuring that the RCN meets its statutory and charitable aims and regulatory obligations. The committee chairs report to Council and provide assurance or make recommendations regarding the actions needed. The Council and committees are supported by governance experts from within the College and external advisors. The expertise that we bring as Council members is in nursing, understanding our regional issues, and being confident to ask questions of the information, executives and advisors to satisfy ourselves that the best decisions are being made. This is the same as we do in our nursing practice and day jobs. As a Council member and in elected roles, you learn to become more confident in asking questions, which means understanding the difference between gaining assurance, where strong evidence is presented that supports what is being said and what you observe, and being given reassurance, that is, where anecdotal or weak evidence is given. Being confident means having the courage to speak up, just as we do in our nursing practice. Where we cannot be assured because the evidence is weak or insufficient, our role is to ask for the plan and timescale to provide the evidence that will give us the assurance. So while there is so much to learn about the Council role, there are also knowledge and skills we bring to it, and so much we take back into our day jobs from whichever role we have taken on as active members. The feeling of making a difference, the sense of pride, and working with such fabulous colleagues who share the same values and aspirations for nursing as you do are all part of being an active member, and I would certainly recommend it to you.
