New legislation and an enhanced VN profession

For many years, the RCVS has been calling for full statutory regulation of veterinary nurses, including protection of the VN title. Achieving this may finally be close – but the profession must make its voice heard to ensure it happens.  The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has launched its historic consultation on potential reforms to the Veterinary Surgeons Act, and now we need your help to make them a reality.

The VSA lacks many of the powers and flexibility of modern regulatory regimes, and much of the flexibility of modern legislation. It is long overdue that the veterinary nurse title to be protected, both to give the public greater assurance on who is qualified and regulated, but also to give due recognition that VNs are now a fully-fledged profession. New legislation would finally fix this. 

Schedule 3 should be replaced by flexible powers that allow the regulator to decide which veterinary acts can be undertaken by VNs, and under what conditions, and the need for the delegating veterinary surgeon to work for the same employer as the veterinary nurse should also go. This would create the opportunity for specialist qualifications and statuses that would allow VNs to do more, for instance ‘community nursing’ or ‘nurse practitioner’ roles.

The Defra proposals include reforms to RCVS Council that would replace it with smaller Board, with veterinary nurses having equal opportunity with veterinary surgeons to serve as Board members. There would also be a council or faculty of veterinary nursing – sitting alongside one for veterinary surgeons - that would be able to input onto many of the College’s functions.

The veterinary professions’ ‘Royal College that regulates’ model is unique. The RCVS is able to go further than other regulators in supportive, proactive regulation such as the Mind Matters Initiative and the RCVS Academy - helping professionals meet the standards expected of them rather than wait until something has gone wrong - and in professional excellence through support for RCVS Knowledge. While these are often seen as ‘Royal College activities’, they are complementary to and supportive of the College’s regulatory activities, and sometimes have a directly regulatory purpose. Together they make up the College’s ‘holistic approach’. Other regulators have begun to adopt this approach as part of what is sometime termed ‘upstream regulation’, but as a Royal College the RCVS can go further and faster.

The Defra consultation gives the option of retaining both regulatory and what it terms ‘leadership’ functions (such as the RCVS Fellowship and some aspects of postgraduate education) under one roof, albeit with a degree of internal separation to improve clarity, with each regulated profession having its own council or ‘faculty’ to oversee relevant activities.

The consultation also presents an alternative option that would retain the RCVS as a regulator shorn of any non-regulatory functions, without any guarantee that these functions would find a new home. This would also stymie future innovation, and would represent an enormous backward-step, contrary to the trend towards more supportive and compassionate regulation seen in other sectors. Reforms to improve clarity may be appropriate, but any overly burdensome separation – whether within one organisation or split between several - would risk increasing costs through additional bureaucracy (which would ultimately be passed on to clients via registration fees) while undermining or removing the holistic benefits of the RCVS.

We strongly support retention of both the Royal College’s regulatory and leadership functions, alongside measures to make the College’s role clearer, and encourage all veterinary nurses to do the same in their consultation responses. 

The consultation was launched on 28 January, and will run for eight weeks, closing on 25 March. The consultation is a key milestone, and a once-in-lifetime opportunity, and we encourage all veterinary nurses to participate while they can.