Paul Rees, the new head of the United Kingdom’s nursing regulator, has admitted that the organisation had been “completely wrong” in the past to refuse to investigate nurses accused of sexual assault outside work.
This is a welcome admission and evidence of a fresh start for the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), following a series of reports by The Independent of rogue nurses who were free to work in the National Health Service.
The council changed its guidance on sexual misconduct after we revealed that it was rejecting calls to investigate nurses accused of abuse, sexual assault and domestic violence in their private lives, as it did not consider this within its remit.
Our reporting prompted the setting up of an independent inquiry by Nazir Afzal KC, which criticised the NMC’s past leadership for a “wilful deafness to criticism”. This included a tendency to resist whistleblowers’ attempts to raise concerns.
In his first national interview as head of the NMC, Mr Rees apologised for a string of scandals and said: “We have to be honest about things that have gone wrong. And things have gone wrong in the past.”
Mr Rees acknowledged, for example, that the body should have acted sooner to suspend psychiatric nurse John Iwuh, who was jailed for 16 years in July 2025 for rape and voyeurism – a case revealed by The Independent. Iwuh was free to work with patients for a year after police first told the NMC they were investigating him in 2022.
Mr Rees apologised for the NMC’s failure and said: “The issue was that the guidance stated where nursing and midwifery or professionals did something outside of their working life, it was outside of our concerns – that was completely wrong. It should have been saying what you do outside of work is just as important as what you do at work.”
He said he was “determined to fix the challenges” and to “turn the ship around”, but admitted that it may take years to complete the work. It is important that he succeeds, because the NMC is a vital guarantor of public trust in the NHS – alongside the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, and the Care Quality Commission, which has overall responsibility for the NHS and social care. Patients have to be assured that the staff looking after them are fit and proper professionals.
The previous NMC doctrine that it was not concerned with what nurses did in their “private lives” was an extraordinary lapse from the standards expected of it, and its defensiveness when such judgements were called into question was unacceptable.
The Independent has found time and time again, in its reporting not just of the NMC but of failings in the NHS more generally, especially in maternity care, that a culture of openness is key. As Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018, has written, a culture of safety requires transparency, honesty and a willingness to learn. The closer the NHS can get to the no-blame culture of aircraft safety, the better.
Ten months into his new role, Mr Rees has made many of the changes that are needed at the NMC, and many of the management team have been replaced. However, we report today that a whistleblower who used to work at the NMC, and who is engaged in an employment dispute with the organisation, says that “the same defensive, dishonest culture” still exists in the NMC. A spokesperson for the NMC said in response that the claims are “simply incorrect”.
We must hope that this is not more of the defensiveness and refusal to face up to justified criticism that has plagued the NMC in the past.
It is vitally important that patients can trust the nurses in whom they place their care.
