Introduction

A key strand of the RCN’s Legal and Governance Review has been to examine our ways of working to ensure that the voice of members truly influences the decisions made in the RCN. 

During the review of boards, members put forward their views and ideas on how this would work in practice and developed a set of objectives for how we should work in future. Namely,

• to give members a stronger voice in the RCN.
• to achieve good two-way communication and robust ways of working which build strong connections between members and the different parts of the decision making structure.
• to ensure decision-making is clear, timely, well-informed and effective.
• to ensure UK developments influence local activity, and local developments influence overall RCN direction.
• to be responsive to the views and concerns of members and member networks and representative groupings at local, country, regional and UK levels.

Key to achieving the objectives is ensuring that those who make the decisions – Council, its committees and RCN boards – are informed by the views of members channelled though their representative committees.

How do we do that?

Developing a standard and consistent consultation process is fundamental to making this work successfully. The starting point for consultation could be at different points in the governance framework depending on the purpose but the most important thing is to ensure that there is an agreed flow-through of information. 

The diagram shows how it would work in practice within the governance structure. The two-way arrows represent the flow-through of information in that structure. Key to making the whole thing work effectively are the views of members being fed into the committee structure.

Please note that the new governance paper template includes a section to record who has been consulted.