UK nursing regulator embeds anti‑racism

Britain’s nursing regulator is moving anti-racism out of the optional seminar and into the core midwifery syllabus at universities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Nursing and Midwifery Council said on April 8 that it will launch new principles for student midwife education to help tackle the Black maternal health crisis. (nmc.org.uk) This is about what student midwives are taught before they qualify. The regulator says universities should build anti-racism into routine teaching on communication, clinical decision-making and escalation, instead of treating bias as a separate add-on. (nmc.org.uk) The trigger is a set of numbers that has barely budged. New national data for 2022 to 2024 showed Black women in the United Kingdom were nearly three times more likely to die during pregnancy or within 42 days after it ended than White women, while Asian women also faced a higher risk. (npeu.ox.ac.uk) The same data showed class and place matter too. Women living in the most deprived areas had a maternal mortality rate about twice that of women in the least deprived areas, which means race and poverty are overlapping pressures rather than separate stories. (npeu.ox.ac.uk) The Nursing and Midwifery Council has been edging toward this for months. In November 2025 it published a midwifery action plan that framed maternity education as part of safe, equitable and person-centred care, and it said cultural competence, anti-racism and unconscious bias awareness would be embedded in education and practice. (nmc.org.uk) That changes the frame from workplace values to patient safety. If a midwife misses pain, dismisses symptoms or fails to escalate concerns because a patient is stereotyped or not heard clearly, the problem is no longer being described as bad manners in the system but as unsafe care in the room. (nmc.org.uk) Midwifery leaders have been pushing in the same direction. The Royal College of Midwives backed calls in 2025 for action on inequalities in maternity outcomes and said a parliamentary report on Black maternal health found systemic failings in leadership, training and ethnicity data collection. (rcm.org.uk) So the practical change is not a new slogan on a poster. It is that newly trained midwives may now be assessed on whether they can recognise racist dynamics, communicate across cultural differences, and act faster when a woman’s condition is worsening instead of assuming the standard script fits everyone. (nmc.org.uk) The harder part comes after the announcement. The Nursing and Midwifery Council can set principles for education, but universities, placement providers and National Health Service maternity units will decide whether those principles become lectures, simulation exercises, assessments and everyday supervision on wards. (nmc.org.uk) If that happens, the next generation of midwives will be taught that racial inequality in childbirth is not a background social issue. It is a clinical risk that shows up in who gets listened to, who gets believed and who gets urgent care in time. (nmc.org.uk)