Dear Stakeholder

Throughout our engagements with practitioners, students, and education providers across the range of professions we regulate – and are working to establish regulation for – as well as members of the public, we have found that explaining regulation, what it’s purpose and function is, can be tricky. Regulation is complex in itself but it also works within a larger health and social care environment where there are professional bodies, education providers and public and private service delivery models.

To support a better understanding of, firstly, the process of regulation and, more specifically, CORU’s regulatory functions, the Strategy and Policy Unit in CORU has developed a suite of video and paper-based resources – what we are calling Regulatory Essentials – that have been designed to help explain, in straightforward language, CORU’s regulatory activities. I am delighted to share that these resources have been published and are now accessible online from the CORU website: Regulatory Essentials – Coru

As a means of trying to capture the range of activities CORU is responsible for, we have designed the Regulatory Wheel. Built around our overarching objective to ensure public protection, our regulatory functions are divided into those that take place before someone is added to a register and those that take place when someone is on the register. Represented through segmented concentric circles, the Regulatory Wheel provides a summary of each function. If you click on each of the segments, a pop-up will appear that provides a summary of the function and a link to the appropriate section of our website for more information. On the Regulatory Essentials webpage, you can also access and download an Information Leaflet and an interactive PDF document that has the same functionality as the interactive wheel on the webpage. Please note that in order to access this functionality, you must save the document to your files and open through Adobe.

Also included as part of the resources developed are short video explainers and more extensive Fact Sheets on a range of foundational regulatory issues, including the role of statutory regulation, the different types of regulatory standards and an introduction to Standards of Proficiency. I encourage you to share these resources with fellow practitioners, educators, those you engage with and use with students in education and training settings.

We hope, in time, to further develop the Regulatory Essentials resources and build on this initial phase of work. In the meantime, I hope these newly developed resources are useful to you and help to more straightforwardly explain CORU’s role and its regulatory functions. Any feedback you have on these resources or suggestions for future resources to be developed would be very much welcomed to strategyandpolicy@coru.ie.

Kind Regards

Catherine

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Catherine Byrne