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June 19, 2025

2024 Annual Report: Building Better Together

A collage of the diverse nurses and patients of Ontario.

From strategic initiatives to strengthened partnerships, 2024 was a year of transformation—one where collaboration was the driving force behind meaningful change.

The theme of CNO’s 2024 Annual Report, Building Better Together highlights our role in the health care system and the benefits of our system partnerships last year. Our collaborations led to impactful solutions to support health human resources and safe nursing practice. Throughout the year, we strengthened partnerships provincially, nationally and internationally, aligning CNO’s organizational priorities to seize opportunities for supporting health care in Ontario and across Canada.

“Collaboration is a core value at CNO, guiding our approach to nursing regulation in Ontario and ensuring safe, ethical care for the public,” said Silvie Crawford, Registrar/Executive Director and CEO of CNO. “It always has been fundamental to advancing patient safety, supporting safe nursing care and strengthening health human resources. As a nurse and as CEO , I have seen firsthand the profound impact of collaboration in driving meaningful change.”

Our work rarely occurs in isolation—it takes a collective effort to support safe nursing practice and patient safety. Our partnerships, in 2024, led to meaningful changes and transformed our work into impactful solutions to support adequate health human resources and safe nursing practice. This also led to CNO being recognized as a trusted system partner, something we will continue to build on in 2025.

Highlights in the annual report:

  • 195,334 total nurses in the Ontario health care system
  • modernizing the registration process to support health system needs, including updating the nursing education registration requirement and adding a new Transition to Practice requirement
  • enhancing labour mobility while supporting safe nursing practice with the Interjurisdictional Nurse Licensure initiative
  • continuing the development of a multi-partner, North American database to support safe care
  • empowering RNs to prescribe, marking a significant enhancement in RN nursing practice
  • empowering nurses through the Supervised Practice Experience partnership
  • paving the way for equity in nursing with our first-ever Workforce Census
  • charting the way forward with a new DEI Strategy

About CNO

The College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO) is the regulator of the nursing profession in Ontario. It is not a school or a nursing association. CNO acts in the public interest by:

  • assessing qualifications and registering individuals who want to practice nursing in Ontario.
  • setting the practice standards of the profession that nurses in Ontario are expected to meet.
  • promoting nurses' continuing competence through a quality assurance program.
  • holding nurses accountable to those standards by addressing complaints or reports about nursing care.

The College was founded in 1963. By establishing the College, the Ontario government was acknowledging that the nursing profession had the ability to govern itself and put the public's well-being ahead of professional interests.

For the latest information, please see our Nursing Statistics page.

Anyone who wants to use a nursing-related title — Registered Nurse (RN), Registered Practical Nurse (RPN) or Nurse Practitioner (NP) must become a member of CNO.

Frequently Asked Questions

Go to the public Register, Find a Nurse, to conduct a search for the nurse. Contact us if you can't find the person you are looking for.

All public information available about nurses is posted in the public Register, Find a Nurse, which contains profiles of every nurse in Ontario. Publicly available information about nurses include their registration history, business address, and information related to pending disciplinary hearings or past findings.

Unregistered practitioners are people who are seeking employment in nursing or holding themselves out as being able to practice nursing in Ontario, but who are not qualified to do so. They are not registered members of CNO. Only people registered with CNO can use nursing-related titles or perform certain procedures that could cause harm if carried out by a non-registered health professional. CNO takes the issue of unregistered practitioners seriously. See Unregistered Practitioners for more information.

To ensure procedural fairness for both the patient (or client) and the nurse, the Regulated Health Professions Act requires that information gathered during an investigation remain confidential until the matter is referred to the Discipline Committee or Fitness to Practise Committee. CNO will not disclose any information that could identify patients (or clients) or compromise an investigation. See Investigations: A Process Guide for more information.

Information obtained during an investigation will become public if the matter is referred to a disciplinary hearing. If a complaint is not referred to a hearing, no information will be available publicly.

See CNO's hearings schedule, which is updated as hearing dates are confirmed. Hearings at CNO are open to the public and the media. For details on how to attend a hearing, contact the Hearings Administration Team.

A summary of allegations and the disciplinary panel outcomes can be found on the public Register, Find a Nurse. Full decisions and reasons are also available.

Where a disciplinary panel makes a finding of professional misconduct, they have the authority to reprimand a nurse, and suspend or revoke a nurse's registration. Terms, conditions and limitations can also be imposed on a nurse's registration, which restricts their practice for a set period. Nurses can also be required to complete remedial activities, such as reviewing CNO documents and meeting with an expert, before returning to practice.

For detailed information see the Sexual Abuse Prevention section.

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