October 08, 2024

Check out CNO’s brand new website

We’ve redesigned our website to be more user-friendly, accessible and responsive.

The homepage of CNO’s new website.

We have a brand-new website!  

You’ll notice our website looks a little different now. We’re excited to announce we’ve redesigned it to ensure you can continue to access the information you need quickly and easily. 

When developing the new site, we made sure it was easy to use and understand for everyone. This means that nurses, applicants, members of the public, nurse employers and all our partners in safety can continue to access the information they need quickly and easily.  

Our new website has a clean and open design, so you can easily find the information you need. When you arrive at the site, you can identify yourself (for example, as a nurse, or as a student, etc.) to see the content most relevant to you. We also created a more powerful search function that allows you to sort results according to relevancy. The new site will be easier to navigate when you use your cellphone, as it’s now fully responsive and will display correctly on any device.  

It was important to us that cno.org be accessible and barrier-free for everyone, so we worked with experts in web design and accessibility optimization to develop a website completely compliant with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005. We’re committed to ongoing audits to ensure it remains up to date with all users’ needs. 

We’ve been making more than just cosmetic changes: the refreshed cno.org is the place where you can go for informative, heartfelt and interesting stories about nurses and the nursing profession, in addition to the most up-to-date information about changes to nursing practice.  

More updates on the way

We know our website isn’t the only point of contact you have with CNO—Find a Nurse, which is our public register, and Maintain Your Membership should also be streamlined, accessible, and easy to use. 

On Find a Nurse, a big change we’re working on is removing the tabs on the member profile pages so the information is easier to read. We made this change based on feedback from nurses and employers and after reviewing how other regulators structured their public registers.

We’re also making updates to enhance the security of Maintain Your Membership and the applicant portal by adding new Multi-Factor Authentication and session time-out features to help keep your account secure. Look for the updates to Find a Nurse to be live in the next few months, and the changes to the portals in 2025.  

You can learn more about the new site and hear news about upcoming changes to Find a Nurse and Maintain Your Membership by visiting cno.org or checking us out on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or X (Twitter).  

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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