Peter Carter, OBE, MCIPD is the General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing, the world's largest professional union of nurses and health care support workers. The RCN has a membership of 400,000 nurses, midwives, health visitors, nursing students, cadets and health care support workers.
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Before assuming the post of RCN General Secretary and Chief Executive in January 2007, Carter spent almost twelve years as the Chief Executive of the Central and North West London Mental Health NHS Trust, one of the largest mental health trusts in the UK with an operating budget of over £180 million and a national reputation.
CNWL was awarded three stars by the Healthcare Commission, and, in Carter's final year, was awarded a rating of "excellent" for quality of care and "good" for use of resources. The Trust received several awards related to standards of patient care and innovative staff initiatives. In January 2007, the CNWL was voted in a poll by readers of the Nursing Times as the best mental health trust to work for the in the entire United Kingdom. However, no Trust was immune to the serious shortage of frontline clinical posts and CNWL was no exception.
Peter Carter commenced his career by training as a psychiatric nurse at Hill End Hospital in St Albans for six years. He moved on to work at the then regional adolescent unit at Hill End Hospital where he undertook further training in family therapy and crisis intervention. Carter is also a general nurse and trained at St Albans City Hospital and the Institute of Urology in London. In addition he has held a number of clinical and managerial posts in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and London.
He is a graduate and a member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. He has a Masters Degree in Business Administration and a Ph.D, both from the University of Birmingham.
Peter Carter also has medico-legal experience in a wide range of health-related litigation issues, specialising in bio-mechanical injuries, homicides and suicides. He was co-author of an inquiry report into the homicide of a young woman in east London. His Ph.D thesis was entitled Understanding reasons why nurses abuse patients in their care. He has lectured extensively on this issue and on leadership issues in general.
Carter was awarded the OBE for services to the National Health Service (NHS) in the 2006 New Year's Honours list.
Carter succeeded Beverly Malone as General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing in January 2007. Since becoming the General Secretary and Chief Executive of the RCN, Peter Carter has restructured his top team and re-focused the organisation to address outstanding issues and the ongoing reforms of the NHS. Under his leadership, the RCN has established itself as a leading voice on nursing and health in the UK political arena.
Carter has led the RCN through a number of important milestones, taking it from an organisation that represented 390,000 members in January 2007, to around 420,000 in January 2012. His internal re-structures and drive to focus on a corporate approach to human relations and employee engagement led to the RCN joining the list of organisations in the Sunday Times Top 100 employers.[1] Entering at 51, having never appeared in the list before, marked a significant victory for the RCN. In terms of other influential lists, Carter also led the RCN back into the HSJ Top 100 most influential people in health, having been absent in the years prior to his arrival. In 2011, Carter was listed at 19,http://www.hsj.co.uk/home/hsj-100/ having moved up from 23 in 2010.
The following addition is disputed by the Royal College of Nursing and contains numerous factual inaccuracies, despite attempts to provide citations. For example, in reference to the case brought before the Certification Officer, it was independently decided that the RCN had followed due process in the case and the complaints were rejected. (http://www.certoffice.org/CertificationOfficer/files/f4/f4a5ddeb-b847-4d8d-a3de-31c6c1b404b5.pdf)
In advance of the New Year Honours for 2012, Peter Carter's public relations team removed various entries from sites across the web relating to controversy in the hope of securing Peter's long sought-after knighthood. Wikipedia entries relating to PR bungles at Mid Staffordshire Hospital where Peter put out praise of excellence prior to revelations of thousands of deaths through poor nursing care (http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-specialisms/management/carter-defends-visit-to-mid-staffs/5027050.article) were removed in a timely manner. A cover up of pensions mismanagement within the RCN itself when the RCN was negotiating on behalf of members in the NHS, caused as a result of misreading of terms and conditions lead to a reduction in benefits for a large number of members of staff. And famously, the walk out of a number of RCN council members over maladministration compromising members safety, eventually culminating in a case brought to the Certification Officer (http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-specialisms/management/rcn-in-hearing-over-members-being-ousted-without-warning/5023683.article), were all sanitised. Notably, in spite of this, no KBE was issued.