Supporting Complaints Investigation for Nursing and Midwifery Regulatory Agencies

Health professional regulators aim to protect the health and well-being of patients and the public by setting standards for scrutinising and overseeing the training and conduct of health and care professionals. A major task of such regulators is the investigation of complaints against practitioners. However, processing a complaint often lasts several months and is particularly costly. Hence, we worked with international regulators from different countries (the UK, US and Australia), to develop the first decision support tool that aims to help such regulators process complaints more efficiently. Our system uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques to process complaints and predict their risk level. Our tool also provides additional useful information including explanations, to help the regulatory staff interpret the prediction results, and similar past cases as well as non-compliance to regulations, to support the decision making.