Healthcare regulators' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

When the novel coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan province in China in December 2019, few of those watching news bulletins would have believed how quickly the virus would sweep across the world and take over our lives. There is no doubt that, despite the sophisticated pandemic plans that have been put in place by individual NHS Trusts and the NHS as a whole, the service is being inundated like never before.

The pandemic crisis now facing the NHS has motivated the healthcare regulators across the UK to amend their strategies to help the NHS in its hour of need. This article will examine how the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) have responded to this unprecedented healthcare emergency.

This is not the first time that the country has had to deal with a pandemic, the last being the swine flu pandemic of 2009. Although highly virulent, there were only 138 deaths in England definitely attributable to the swine flu virus, although the Chief Medical Officer at the time was reporting that up to 65 000 people in the UK could die (Bowcott and Batty, 2009).