“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” –  Marcus Aurelius

25th July 2024

Dear Helen Herniman, 

I am writing to you with a deep sadness in my heart, a letter I never thought I would consider let alone write, but I am left with no choice. 

In 2004 I went on a journey. One I had not expected to take. I had been studying for a law degree and during that time I had been managing my university fees by working in a dementia nursing home. It was supposed to be a means to an end, but I fell in love. The work was incredible. I felt such a sense of satisfaction from the smallest things, such as holding a little old lady’s hand, to the fascination around dressings. My mind was made up much to my mother’s horror. I would not pursue the career I had chosen from the age of 12 as a barrister, I would be a nurse! 

I studied at UCLAN and loved both the academia and the placements, everywhere I went I felt I left a piece of my heart because I invested so much and without a doubt took so much from it. In my final year I had the choice to make for my elective and I thought about the area of addiction simply because my now husband lived in London, and I thought one day I may need this skill coming from the ‘drug free’ Northwest of England! I dreaded the placement if I am honest, having come from a home were addiction caused a traumatic childhood, but I braced myself and never looked back. I once again fell deeper in love with nursing, I was able to make a difference! The measurements were small, but I loved it, I loved the autonomy, the therapeutic elements, the patients, and the staff. From this I journeyed my way through a career in this field and in 2010 following the birth of my first daughter I decide to do my Masters in Prescribing, another area I became passionate about, who knew I could feel such excitement over pharmacology?! I passed and continued through my career, setting up one of the first nurse led services for a non-stat, to Head of Nursing for Turning Point, then onto Clinical Director for Cranston running a detox hospital and finally as Director of Nursing for Forward Trust managing the area of addiction in over 40 of the prisons in the UK. Everywhere I went I championed nursing, from the Universities I lectured in, to the opportunities I sought to mentor students, bringing them in to all the services I worked in. I became an expert witness and worked on cases that involved nurses and was the first in the organisation to take on work from the NMC. 

In 2019 my third child was just born, and I felt the pull away from senior nursing and really wanted to have the patient contact I had set out to have and knew that there was nowhere to go within my career that would allow me to have this other than setting something up myself with the vision of good quality care. This was a leap of faith because I was being offered jobs in Dubai and other Head of Nursing roles that were very appealing, but I jumped. What was intended to simply be a service that was me only a few days a week grew to what is now 20 staff members in two locations and the ethos remains the same; that we provide good quality care and are ratified by our CQC registration. 

Through my private practice my reputation has preceded me, and we have taken on contracts that we have both put a case in for and won such as our national blue light crisis service which is for Ambulance and Firefighters nationally as well as the police regionally. We work with individuals and organisations such as Liverpool University, the London school of architect, Leigh Day solicitors and many more. We are an ethical service which means we are busy, and we provide quality to patients with mental health and neurodiversity issue. So you can see the journey and you can see the passion. Throughout my career I have upheld the NMC code, and its standards run through my veins. 

In 2021 my organisation had been working with an occupational health company. an unscrupulous organisation who went on to later prey on the COVID pandemic by hiking up the cost of supplies. They were a conduit for us to provide therapeutic support to ambulance staff who were amazing people in a NHS Trust that was unsupportive to it staff. My team, along with others were therapeutically supporting those people but sadly, over the course of time what we came to realise was that the safeguarding measures we were highlighting needing to be implemented by THE COMPANY were not being communicated to the Trust, leaving huge risks, and in November 2021 I gave notice to THE COMPANY and Whistle blew on the organisation in line with my supervision and best practice. I communicated this with the Trust, CQC and the NMC. I additionally had to involve the ICO. The company retaliated by refusing to pay their invoices owing me nearly 60k in the final bill, and then went on to refer me to the NMC. This was heart-breaking, but I had faith in the process, knowing I had been transparent throughout and had files relating to my whistleblowing, so believed that this would be managed sensitively and swiftly. I was wrong. 

We are now nearly 4 years down the line and still in the process of this case and the level of trauma it involves. I hear from the NMC every 7 months on average to tell me that its being processed and each email is another punch in the gut and a noose around my neck. 

In August 2022 we had an abusive patient who repeatedly shouted and screamed at the admin team when she did not get what she wanted. We followed policy and terminated her direct care with us but offered her the support through a shared care agreement. She put a referral into the NMC, siting things such as a prescription not being sent recorded delivery (we send all our scripts special delivery), completing ECGs in order to safely prescribe and claiming to not have been told what may happen if she decides to stop taking medication. Another clearly vexatious referral and one which I have heard nothing from the NMC for nearly a year. 

In the spring of 2024 a staff member of IStraker Consultants was dismissed following an investigation into her bullying and harassment of another staff member. On that same day she sent a letter to the NMC and the CQC as well as a barrage of abuse online, talking about my baby and the ethics of the company. In her letter to the NMC she had taken a photograph of 6 random prescriptions and made the wild claim that BLANK prescriptions were being batch signed and administrators were given the role of making clinical decisions and writing prescriptions! I had evidenced that these were out of the void file, the dates of procurement being dated back to 2022 before she was employed and an email evidencing she was able to access them as well as her vexatious behaviour and inconsistent ramblings within the referral, taking photos of my baby’s nursery, random emails that had no links to what she was stating etc. I provided 15-character references and all our policies and processes as well as the logic that the prescriptions were not BLANK in her picture and based on the 200 we provide per week this was not evidence of her statement. This was a staff member with a grudge and one that had already been disregarded by the CQC. The NMC however wrote to me on Friday 12^th of July, 3 months after the referral, to state that they I had to attend an interim panel where my fitness to practice was under scrutiny, and I was later told by a Barrister that a suspension order was in the pipeline. I was floored, by this point I had no faith in the NMC, the internal enquiry had been released and the 6 suicides of BME nurses who had been left waiting for years simply mirrored my experience of the NMC, I could not muster up any hope other than the panel would see the truth and my character. I was thankful it was booked for two weeks’ time as I felt that I would not be left with another noose around my neck. The build up to this was difficult, I had to consider the impact on the business on the staff and the 1000 patients that prescribed within my service, I was told that the NMC could suspend with immediate effect despite the fallout of these patients and shared care agreements. 

I did all that the RCN told me to do and I turned my laptop on Monday 22^nd of July at 9am. This was then pushed back to 2pm to give the panel time to read additional information that had been included at 6am that morning! What was the additional information? The other two cases that the NMC had left me hanging on for 4 and 2 years, I was shocked and disheartened, the slowness of the NMC in those previous malicious referrals continued to have an impact on my future. I pressed on and believed that at 2pm we would start, we entered the Teams meeting at 2:20 and I was deeply troubled to see a screen of Caucasian faces. I am shocked that the NMC cannot have a level of fair representation within its panels, knowing the history of the NMC for nurses like me and the recent enquiry, I felt hopeless, and this was embedded further when the meeting was adjourned with no date given due to the information they needed to read. 

I looked on and knew that I had to make a decision. I could not continue in an institution that pretends to consider its nurses when all it does is cause damage. I could not contend with another 2 years of waiting as this is what I had been told it would take for the case to actually be heard. I could not let the NMC have a moment more of mine or my family’s life. In the 4 years since THE COMPANY’s referral, I have lost my mother, had another baby, and had a father diagnosed with a terminal illness. I have continued to thrive despite the pressures, but I choose to say no more.  My opinion and experience that the NMC is not to be trusted with the lives of its nurses. It is a regulator, it should be free to do its job and I support and uphold this, but with the clause that it is done swiftly for all involved, not an insurmountable torturous number of years. The impact is too great mentally and physically on the nurse and its family. It is cruel. 

What I have also realised is that you are unable to critique the NMC whilst you are inside it out of fear and nobody chooses to leave because they are dammed if they do and dammed if they don’t. I had Stockholm syndrome for a long time, but my eyes have been opened and I say no more. No more misrepresentation. No more racism. No more cruel and untimely responses. No more damaging of people’s lives. 

So, to the NMC, I relinquish my PIN. I state that despite the fact that I, Ishbel Straker, will always be a nurse, I choose to remove myself from a registration that causes harm. I will live in freedom from the shackles of the NMC, I will not wait daily for the sword of Damocles to drop when the NMC chooses to deem a malicious claim to be a danger to the public, and I will feel free of the misrepresentation of the whiteness of the NMC. 

Warm Regards, 

Ishbel Straker, RMN, INP.