Patient-centred care should be at core of nursing education

As well as patient-centred care, the report recommends that patient safety and respect for dignity should also be top priorities. 

The report also calls for the registration and regulation of healthcare support workers and suggests there should be more clarity on staffing ratios, roles and responsibilities of different levels of staff.

The Royal College of Nursing asked Lord Willis of Knaresborough to lead an independent inquiry into what excellent pre-registration nursing education in the UK should look like and how it should be delivered. Recommendations are outlined in full in the report ‘Quality with compassion: the future of nursing education’ which is available on the Willis Commission website.

Decline in standards of care

The commission found no major shortcomings in nursing education that could be held directly responsible for poor practice or the perceived decline in standards of care. Nor did it find any evidence that degree-level registration was damaging to patient care.

However, the report calls for nursing education programmes to be better evaluated, and based on extensive research that provides evidence on the correlations between current practice, entry criteria and selection processes, attrition rates and course outcomes.