Serious Concerns - Students' Fitness to Practise

An action or omission by a student that significantly calls into question their competence, health status or adherence to relevant Professional Body Standards of conduct, performance and ethics (NMC 2015,  HCPC 2016) should be reported to the PEF and WBLT immediately.

The concerns will be serious enough to warrant immediate action rather than be addressed through the mentorship/supervision and practice assessment process.

Examples of such incidents may include:

• Actions that compromise the safety of patients/clients or others
• Actions that call into question the student’s trustworthiness
• Serious breaches of policies or procedures
• Breaches of confidentiality
• Abuse, neglect or exploitation of vulnerable people, or entering into inappropriate relationships with such people
• Inappropriate or aggressive behaviour towards patients/clients, staff or others, this would include developing inappropriate relationships with such people
• Medication administration errors
• The student experiencing acute mental or physical health issues
  

The above list is not exhaustive. As a “rule of thumb”, this procedure embraces any incident that would result in immediate action being taken if it involved a member of staff of the placement’s organisation.

Serious untoward incidents involving student procedure:

ACTION PLANNING FOLLOWING A SERIOUS UNTOWARD INCIDENT

An Action Plan will be drawn up if there are conduct or competence issues that a student must address to ensure that the serious untoward incident is not repeated.

Action planning is appropriate for incidents that do not result in a Fitness to Practice hearing, or following a Fitness to Practice hearing a student is allowed to continue on their programme of study.

The Plan should include:
Actions to be carried out by the Student, e.g.:

• Conducting self in an appropriate manner
• Undertaking additional learning activities
• Undertaking additional practice experiences
• Undertaking remedial assessment of practice
• Undertaking Occupational Health assessment

Actions to be carried out by Practice/UCLan staff (Mentor, PEF, Link Lecturer, Academic Advisor), e.g.:

• Facilitating additional learning experiences
• Monitoring student’s conduct or competence
• Monitoring student’s health status
• Carrying out remedial assessment of practice

Details of any remedial assessment of practice, and timescale for its achievement

• The Action Plan may include a remedial summative practice assessment

Details of monitoring arrangements and timescale for completion of plan.

• It should be stated how often and by whom the plan must be monitored, and when the plan should be “signed off” by the Course/Cohort Leader as having been completed